syslogs not rotated - cron.daily never run because computer never up at 6:25am?

[Malte Forkel <malte.forkel@berlin.de>]

The root partition of a machine running Debian Etch has filled up because log files like /var/log/syslog are not rotated and have become huge.

As far as I understand, the script that rotates the system logs is /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd, which should be triggered by the entry

 25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

in /etc/crontab. But I found only one reference to the scripts in cron.daily being executed over the last couple of months.

Could it be that cron ignores its daily tasks if the machine is down at the time specified for cron.daily in /etc/crontab? I.e., if the machine is never up at 6:25am, the daily cron jobs are never executed? If that's the case, how do I schedule jobs that are truly executed every day, even if the machine only runs at irregular times?

Thanks in advance,
Malte