Jason Cahill

I must admit, I was never much of a Ren and Stimpy fan, but if you haven’t seen their ridiculous “fake commercial” for “Log!!”, then you owe it to yourself to head over to YouTube and do a quick search for “it’s log ren stimpy”… It’s a takeoff on the 70’s ads for Slinky, but taken to a new level of absurdity. Sadly, this was the first thing that popped in my mind when I sat down to write this post.

So, logs. We love ‘em, but as I mentioned in my last post on partitioning hard drives for your SharePoint servers, you want to have a single, consistent location on every machine where your log files can be placed. Additionally, this should be a separate logical partition from your OS and swap files so that when it gets too big, you don’t lose your system.

So, what should you do? Here’s what we do: First, let’s assume your logical log drive is E:. The first thing to do is to create two folders: E:\logs\iis and E:\logs\uls. Then you will redirect your IIS and ULS (SharePoint Trace Logs) into these folders. Here’s how: Open up Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (these instructions assume IIS 7) and click on your server name (you must do this for each and every server in your farm). In the main body of the dialog, select Logging:

When the Logging page appears, you’ll want to configure it as follows:

Then, using the drop downs set:

• One log file per: Site
• Format: IIS
• Directory: E:\logs\iis

Next you’ll want to redirect the SharePoint Trace Logs (ULS Logs). To do this, go to Central Administration > Operations > Diagnostic Logging:

Here, at the bottom of the page, click in the Path: edit box and change it to:

• E:\logs\uls

Click OK.

Because this is set once in Central Admin, there are two consequences: It doesn’t propagate instantly to every server, it will instead kick off as a job in a short time. Secondly, the path that you specify must exist and be the same on every machine in the farm. Failure to do this will result in problems.