Log Retention Policy¶
DISCLAIMER: this is not legal nor technical advice. It is just a WIP proposal, open to discussion, on how a Jitsi server can be quickly (and legally) deployed in order to host one’s own private videomeetings, based on authors’ practical experiences.
As already mentioned in the introduction, running a Jitsi server does involve the processing of personal data (IP address, username, displayname, browser, OS, pages – i.e. conference rooms – visited, login/logout times, etc.). These personal data are also stored in the logs of various software components – namely:
- jicofo
- jitsi-videobridge (jvb)
- nginx
- prosody
- fail2ban
- rsyslog
- ufw
In most use contexts, such log data should be retained only for a short period of time (which may be indicatively set to 7 days, to comply with GDPR “storage limitation” principle), and just for security reasons (which constitute a legitimate interest of the Data Controller, in the sense of the GDPR).
logrotate configuration¶
In order to do so, go to /etc/logrotate.d
and edit the config files for each of the packages/components above. We suggest to delete any hourly
/weekly
/monthly
setting as well as any rotate
and size
setting, and replace them with the following settings:
daily
maxsize 100M
missingok
rotate 7
maxage 7
dateext
Particularly:
-
daily
creates daily log files; -
maxsize 100M
splits log files when they reach 100MB (whilesize
should be avoided because it overrides log retention settings, and retain logs until they reach the set size); -
missingok
: do not write an error message if the log file is missing; -
rotate 7
: keep only 7 log files; -
maxage 7
delete log files if they are older than 7 days (just in case one or more log files have not been created, to avoid that log files older than 7 days could still be retained) -
datext
: (optional) add date tag to log file names, instead of just a number.
After modification, restart logrotate service:
sudo service logrotate restart