cvs commit: src/usr.sbin/syslogd syslogd.c

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:

> +> What I'd like to see is an argument to syslogd to specify a maximum full level for the target file system.  Log data is valuable, but being able to write to
> +> /var/tmp/vi.recover is also important.  syslogd -l 90% could specify that sylogd should not write log records, perhaps other than an "out of space record" to a log file on
> +> a file system with >=90% capacity.  This prevents the kernel from spewing about being out of space also.  The accounting code does exactly this, for identical reasons.
>
> One of the things I like about UFS is that it has 8% of reserved space and 
> when syslogd is running as root, it can still log, even when /var/ is full 
> of users' data. Of course there should be separate /var/log/ partition, 
> but...
>
> In my opinion it'll be good, if we can stop logging various levels when we 
> hit Avail=0% and stop the rest at Avail=-4% maybe. Maybe we should take logs 
> only from logpriv when Avail=0%...

The trick will be balancing flexibility with complexity for the administrator. 
-s foopercent is easy for an administrator to understand, and conditional 
logging of message types based on percentage is not.  I can imagine a useful 
middle ground on the order of -s info,80 or such, which means don't log info 
and lower when about 80%, but we'd need to think a little carefully about how 
to present this sort of thing so it's useful as opposed to simply confusing. 
:-)

Robert N M Watson