[X-Unix] syslogd problems

[Kevin Stevens]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, William H. Magill wrote:

> On 07 Jun, 2004, at 22:01, Kevin Stevens wrote:
> > Ok, I'm tired of this.  Can anyone help me with the OS X syslogd
> > program and syslogd.conf?  Please start with where the hell I can find
> > accurate documentation.
>
> Please report this to Apple. It is a "known problem" -- Unix engineers
> update the modules in the System and fail to update the man pages.

Will do, thanks.

> The "current" man page can be found at www.freebsd.com - select "Manual
> Pages" from the left column, and then type "syslogd" into the box.

Or I could just pull them from my FreeBSD box.  ;)  Didn't realize they
were the same.  Does that mean that I should be able to cross-reference
userland executable issues in general, or just expect the same
functionality?  FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x?

... (checking)
Well, I already see one potential problem.  -u per the BSD man page
enables unique priority logging, while per the OS X man page it sets UDP
mode!  No wonder I was having trouble getting it to work!
grr...

> > I want to log syslog entries from a different device to my G5
> > (10.3.4).  I can eventually get syslog info to be accepted and logged
> > by killing syslogd and restarting it with the -u option.  However, in
> > both my and a friend's experience, doing so will cause the machine to
> > become totally unresponsive to mouse, keyboard, or remote access
> > within 24-48 hours.  Leaving a 'top' session running doesn't show any
> > obvious problems with memory, processes, or CPU when this happens.
>
> A full disk?

No, scores of gigs free.

> A "deadly embrace" in the Disk I/O system? (I know this problem exists
> with Adaptec SCSI in 10.2.8.)  If the system is unresponsive, I would
> expect something like this.

Maybe.  But by "unresponsive" I mean that the mouse will move around the
screen, but won't activate/bring forward different running windows (though
the window contents, for example 'top', keep refreshing).  That doesn't
seem very disk-ish.  How would I check, some incantation of vmstat or
iostat?

> > A separate issue is that I don't see an obvious way to restart syslogd
> > with different options without hacking around in the system rc script,
> > which I'm loathe to do for best practice reasons.
>
> No, I don't believe there is. (Although you should not have to, it
> appears to be the only place where anything is done with syslogd --
> StartupItems does nothing.)

Did I mention 'grr....'?

Thanks for the response, just getting the correct man page is a huge step
forward!

KeS