[systemd-devel] Need help with getting messages into /var/log/messages

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 12:43 PM, David Strauss <david at davidstrauss.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:57 PM, Paul Richards <paulrichards321 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2. My main question: The logging isn't making it into
>> /var/log/messages or into dmesg.

*Into* dmesg? We do not forward stuff to the kernel buffer by default.
'Dmesg' only contains kernel messages usually, the journal can forward
all stuff to dmesg, with a kernel command line option, but that is
more for debugging or special purpose setups, and not a default.

> I can only see it with journalctl. Is
>> there anywhere to fix that? My target system is Fedora 17 vanilla that
>> runs rsyslog.
>
> It's not really Fedora 17 vanilla if you use rsyslog instead of the
> systemd journal. :-)

The journal will not try to write the old syslog files, if they are
needed/expected for anything, a syslog daemon needs to run in parallel
to the journal.

It will likely be that way also in future products, the journal will
unlikely ever cover plain text files or any aspect of the original
syslog network protocol.

> Are you trying to disable the journal entirely? You should try
> disabling the journal service and checking out the Fedora 16 syslog
> setup, which uses rsyslog with socket activation.

The running journal process is not supposed to be disabled. It needs
to run, at least in the current vesion; it's an expected-to-always-run
core part of systemd like udev.

The journal can be instructed though, to not store anything on disk,
or in recent version not store anything at all, but just forward
messages to a syslog daemon. But as said, it needs to run to be able
to do that.

Kay