Re: Useless syslogd

[Gary Thomas <gary@mlbassoc.com>]

On 02/14/2011 10:04 AM, Darren Hart wrote:
> On 02/11/2011 02:33 PM, Gary Thomas wrote:
>> On 02/11/2011 03:27 PM, Chris Larson wrote:
>>> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Tom Zanussi<tom.zanussi@intel.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 12:47 -0800, Gary Thomas wrote:
>>>>> ... at least out of the box.
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that syslog is configured to store its messages in
>>>>> a buffer (memory only?) by default:
>>>>>
>>>>> $ cat meta/recipes-core/busybox/files/syslog.conf
>>>>> DESTINATION="buffer" # log destinations (buffer file remote)
>>>>> ...
>>>>>
>>>>> This doesn't seem very useful to me. I know I can override this
>>>>> in my platform recipes, but I was just wondering what's the
>>>>> rationale? Would it not make more sense to chose DESTINATION="file"?
>>>>> Otherwise, where do the messages go? How can I see them?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I think 'logread' is hooked up to read from the buffer, but it seems to
>>>> be broken at the moment...
>>>
>>> logread is indeed the way to access the circular buffer, though it
>>> does seem like operating against a file would be more consistent -- I
>>> think the original logic was that most of the targeted devices didn't
>>> have a writable area to put the logs, other than flash, if that, but
>>> using tmpfs seems just as good a solution and the logs can be read in
>>> a more traditional fashion..
>>
>> Indeed. I hacked it before(*) so that /var/log could be ramdisk
>> and then rotate the logs to FLASH periodically. Sadly, this
>> isn't supported out of the box (at least busybox's logrotate
>> insists on keeping the rotated files in /var/log), but I think
>> it's the best of both worlds.
>>
>> (*) using an ad-hoc logrotate that could have the rotated files
>> end up in a directory other than /var/log
>>
>
> I think this is a good idea, but I don't know that anyone will have the time to jump on it right now. May I suggest you open a bug / feature enhancement so we don't lose track of
> this?

Done as two separate bugs
   Bug 717 - Improve syslog configurability
   Bug 718 - Allow logrotate to use a different file system from the original logs

-- 
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Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
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