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The Strained Relationship Between Systemd and Syslog

posted by martyb on Sunday April 19 2015, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the with-all-this-logging-we-need-a-lumberjack dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

World-renowned Unix master Chris Siebenmann has written an article entitled 'I wish systemd would get over its thing about syslog'. It addresses the strained relationship between the systemd init system and the traditional syslog approach to logging used on many Linux systems.

Chris writes:

Anyone who works with systemd soon comes to realize that systemd just doesn't like syslog very much. In fact systemd is so unhappy with syslog that it invented its own logging mechanism (in the form of journald). This is not news. What people who don't have to look deeply into the situation often don't realize is that systemd's dislike is sufficiently deep that systemd just doesn't interact very well with syslog.

This is a must-read article for anyone who needs to use systemd and syslog together.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:05PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:05PM (#172914) Homepage

    You forgot one important fact.

    Just install rsyslog and you can have your plain text logs and eat your systemd cake too. My computer running systemd has both metadata-tagged journald logs AND plain text logs. People who bemoan journald are just looking for a reason to hate systemd when there are other VALID reasons for doing so.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by frojack on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:38PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:38PM (#172925) Journal

    Believe I covered that in my second paragraph.

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:43PM

    by zocalo (302) on Sunday April 19 2015, @08:43PM (#172926)
    Or, if you prefer, you can install your syslog daemon of choice, configure systemd to copy all it's message to that and then simply turn off systemd's journal so you don't get the binary files at all. There's probably a little extra overhead as messages get passed between the Kernel, systemd and syslog, but unless you are generating an insane level of messages at log level debug I doubt it would be noticeable. To do this, in /etc/systemd/journald.conf set:

    Storage=none
    ForwardToSyslog=yes

    Then create a file named /etc/rsyslog.d/sd-socket.conf that contains:

    $AddUnixListenSocket /run/systemd/journal/syslog
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    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2015, @09:19PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 19 2015, @09:19PM (#172937)

      Great! So now, after only a few months, I know how to do a quick-n-dirty little hack that gets me back to only slightly less functionality than before systemd landed.