Sometimes System logs on a Plesk server will not Populate as a result of rsyslog package not installed on the system.

Here at Ibmi Media, we shall look into ways to resolve this plesk error.

Nature of the Plesk error "System logs not populating"

In this situation, system logs such as /var/log/maillog, /var/log/secure or /var/log/messages are empty and not populating.

Also, When activating Fail2Ban at Tools & Settings > IP Address Banning (Fail2Ban) > Settings, the operation is successful, but the option Enable intrusion detection is still disabled.

The error takes the below form in the service status:

# service fail2ban status
...
ERROR    Failed during configuration: Have not found any log file for ssh jail

The main cause of this issue is a result of the system package rsyslog which is responsible for logging is not installed on the server.

So on CentOS/RHEL-based distributions, you can run the below command to check it and you will see that it yields no output:

#rpm -qa | grep rsyslog
#

Same on Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions, you can run the below command to see:

# dpkg -l | grep rsyslog
#

Note: The rsyslog package does not come by default on AlmaLinux installations.

Steps to fix Plesk error "System logs not populating" 

1. Firstly, connect to the Plesk server via SSH.

2. Then, install the rsyslog package:

On CentOS/RHEL-based distributions, run the below command:

$ yum install rsyslog

Or the command below, if DNF package manager is used:

$ dnf install rsyslog

On Debian/Ubuntu-base distributions, run the command:

$ apt install rsyslog

3. Finally, start the rsyslog service with the below command:

$ systemctl start rsyslog

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