Grant asks:

Is there a way to use cflog to log to a log [lol] that doesn't get deleted by admin? If so, could it still rollover at a certain size? If not, what's the best way to accomplish this? I want to create a log my system can depend on as a valid resource if all other means of finding out what happened fail.

The short answer is no. As far as I know, once ColdFusion sees N version of a log file, where N is the number specified in your ColdFusion administrator in Log Settings/Maximum number of Archives, then the file will be deleted. You can kinda "cheat" your way around this. For example, I discovered that I could set the maximum number to 100000, which is probably enough to cover a couple decades of log files. (Actually, I tried 999999999999 first and got a fun little max int error.) You could also set the maximum file size higher as well. But technically - both of these do not solve the problem.

If you truly wanted to be sure ColdFusion wouldn't delete your logs you would need to use cffile instead. All cflog does is write, in a standard format, to the ColdFusion log directory. You could easily mimic this yourself. As for handling "rolling" - I actually don't like ColdFusion's way of rolling by size. I prefer rolling by date. If you want a simple day based file pattern you could use code like so...

<cfset name = "base"> <cfset name &= "." & day(now()) & "." & month(now()) & "." & year(now()) & ".txt"> <cfoutput>#name#</cfoutput>

In this snippet, the original value of name simply represents a name for the log. It could be 'security', 'cms', 'beer', etc. I then append the day, month, and year to the file name along with .txt. (And of course, .log would be fine.) This creates a file name of the form, base.29.11.2010.txt. You could add the current hour as well for more granularity.