Anton Aylward wrote:
On 09/02/2016 04:21 AM, Daniel Bauer wrote:
would syslog-ng give me a textfile like /var/log/messages that I can just look at from time to time?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that (a) it depends what you mean by "like", and (b) how willing you are to spend time learning, RTFM, reading how-to articles, to get syslog-ng to sing and dance the way you want.
Anton, that is just not true. What Daniel wants, he'll get with the default config. There is no need to suggest it is any more difficult.
In the dim mists of times long past one of the most useful programs to me as a pupal sysadmin was a tool called 'swatch'. This was long before the Swiss watch company of that name with the colourful bands. It was a Perl script that ... [snip]
So that means it was after 1987, by which time Swatch had been operating for five years I think :-)
watched the output of the old, vanilla, under-equipped syslog. It could be configured to watch for any event or series of events occurring in a time period or sequence and notify you by email, writing to your console or even LO! by sending a message to your pager. This was in the days before cell phones and SMS.
Okay, now we've got it narrowed down to somewhere between 1987 and 1995.
There's syslog and there's syslog-ng.
If you aren't interested in what syslog-ng can do that makes things like swatch irrelevant because syslog-ng can be configured to do it all, then stick with the vanilla 'syslog'.
openSUSE defaults to installing no syslog, but to suggest "syslogd" today instead of rsyslog or syslog-ng is really poor advice, IMHO.
Why am I saying this?
Yes, I do wonder.
If all you need is the basic "point and sheet' level of technology then don't get something more complicated, more complex, more configurable than you need unless you are willing to invest in learning about it and making use of its capability. It will be a frustration for you.
Assuming we are talking about syslog-ng, I disagree. Completely. For anyone with a desire to have /var/log/messages and /var/log/mail written to disk as we used to have, simply install rsyslog or syslog-ng, and that's it. They'll both do all kinds of singing and dancing, but unless you want them to, you don't need to do any further studies. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (26.4°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - your free DNS host, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org