Prevent Event Log from Being the Cause of System Crashes

Did you know that if your event log fills up it could prevent your server from operating properly (read as: not at all)? To ensure that all new events are written to the log when it is full you need to go into event viewer and select the overwrite events as needed option for each of the logs (system, security and applications) To do this click on logs drop down in event viewer and go down to Log Settings. Under the change settings box select each log type and click on the radio button that says overwrite events as needed. By default NT only overwrites events older than 7 days. The log is given a default size of 512k and could fill up very quickly.

I change this on all of our workstations and especially the servers. Another way around this is you could use the below utility to clear your log within a batch file.

There is a freeware utility called ClearEl that will clear an event log from a shortcut, command prompt, or batch file. I have uploaded it to Thethin.net /files/clearel.zip. To run ClearEL, switch to the directory it is installed in and type:

ClearEL option

where option is one of the following:

• system
• app
• security
• all

I couldn't get it to clear my Security log , but it worked fine with the system and app options.

You could also increase the size of your event log if you are worried about deleting the entries so the likelyhood of it filling up does not happen.