Re: Error messages from syslogd

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 12:50:37PM -0700, Tina Bird wrote:

> uh, d00d. the problem is that in my 10+ years of looking at UNIX log data,
> i've only ever seen 4 messages generated *by* syslogd (as opposed to
> received by):
> 
> stopping
> restarting
> host unreachable
> last message repeated N times

Don't forget what happens if you reference a file in syslog.conf that
doesn't exist or can't be created:

Jul 11 17:05:23 highlander syslogd: /var/log/nosuchdir/nosuchdir2/foo: No such file or directory

Here is a bad priority message:

Jul 11 17:17:35 highlander syslogd: line 35: unknown priority name "nosuchpriority"

Bad facility:

Jul 11 17:18:31 highlander syslogd: line 35: unknown facility name "nosuchfacility"

Hostname resolution error:

Jul 11 17:19:26 highlander syslogd: line 35: WARNING: nosuchhost could not be resolved

Note: those messages are from a handy Solaris system with the msgid
stuff turned off.

I've seen other error messages under pathological cases.  I.e. FS
corruption during disk failure lead to some basic system devices not
being available.  Don't want to attempt to reproduce that, though.  :)

- Morty