In the 1990s and early 2000s I did a lot of Unix-Like (Minix, SunOS, HP-UX, Xenox) and later Linux (mostly RedHat and SuSE) work. The internet and Linux weren’t as big as they are now and old stuff was still in use including syslogd.
So recently wanting to do more on the Linux side of things using OpenSuSE (as 15+ years ago, I spent most of my time with SuSE Linux) and assumed logging was still done using syslogd like Mac OS X does.
Boy, I was wrong. Like the internet and lots of other things, logging on OpenSuSE has fragmented in at least these three categories of which two syslog implementations (but syslogd is deprecated and – according to the URC #SUSE Channel – unmaintained):
- journald (installed by default on my Tumbleweed text-only systems)
- rsyslog (which is supposed to be default on modern OpenSuSE installs but somehow isn’t on my Tumbleweed but is on 13.1 and 13.2)
- syslog-ng
- proprietary logging (of many applications in
/var/log like named, apache, etc)
There seems to be heated debates on what to use when, so I’ll try to stick with the defaults as much as possible.
A few things I need to sort out:
- where is journald persisted?
- how can journald being rotated?
- what to do with packages that require one form of syslog or the other?
- can I direct journald to a syslog implementation?
- how does this apply to other distros?
Tonu Su (TSu2) posted an elaborate answer on the above questions on the OpenSuSE forums.
–jeroen
via:
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 