LinuxQuestions.org - syslog asynchronous option

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syslog asynchronous option

Ive been trying to find some more information on the asynchronous option for syslog. I believe this is where you put a "-" in front of the file name.
Ideally im trying to find 2 things :

A good description of what this does.
And how to troubleshoot syslog where it is unable to write to the file and logs are lost. Is there anyway to get error counters etc for the logs have that been lost and not written to file ?

Many Thanks,

Hi -

1. "asynchronous" (buffered) syslogging is a performance optimization:

Quote:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...ce-be-improved

You can configure syslogd (and rsyslog at least) not to sync the log files after a log message by prepending a "-" to the log file path in the configuration file. This speeds up performance at the expense of the danger that log messages could be lost in a crash.

2. You want to log the logging failures. Good luck with that ;)

The good news is that logging tends to be very reliable. Especially if you're watchful enough to avoid max'ing out your disk.

If want want to be really paranoid, you can always syslog to some alternate resource (a remote PC or a database are two Pop Favorites), then make sure there's never any delta between what's written to one and the other.

'Hope that helps .. PSM