A question about logrotate

["Thomas H. George" <xyz@spininternet.com>]

I ran out of space in a 9 Gbyte /var directory, most of the space 
consumed by debug, kern.log and syslog files.  With a little searching I 
found the logrotate command and realized these files were being 
rotated.   In /var/log I found a large (approximately 1 Gbyte) syslog 
file plus an equally large syslog.0 file and seven syslog.n.gz files 
where n=1..7.  The same was true of the debug and kern.log files. 
Examining the /etc/logrotate.conf file I found nothing that corresponded 
to this rotation scheme so there must be a default somewhere.  To free 
space I added the following lines to the logrotate.conf file:

/var/log/debug {
   missingok
   daily
   rotate 1
}

/var/log/kern.log {
   missingok
   daily
   rotate 1
}

/var/log/syslog {
   missingok
   daily
   rotate 1
}

and then ran logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf.

This freed up 3 Gbytes of space but it perhaps is a very crude 
solution.  As I noted above, the files were being rotated but not 
according to the logrotate.conf file so there must be a default 
somewhere.  Where?  Should I try to find and edit it?  Does anyone have 
a well thought out logrotate.conf file or more detailed information than 
that given in the man pages?

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Tom George