[syslog-ng]Multiple configuration files.

[Gregor Binder]

Scott A. McIntyre on Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 09:13:37AM +0100:

Hi,

> Is there any way to have syslog-ng read it's configuration information
> in the increasingly popular "everything in this directory is a
> configuration file to be read" manner?  The examples I'm thinking of
> include xinetd and logrotate...

I didn't realize this was increasingly popular ;)

> It would be useful to have all of the host-specific filters,
> destinations and sources all in one file, but only for that host in
> question, rather than having to build what could eventually be a very
> large single file.

I would prefer "include" directives as opposed to the directory thing.

What if you edit a file in this directory and restart syslog-ng while
the editor keeps a backup-copy in the same place? How do you handle
backup copies of configuration that you change? I usually create
"configfile.YYYYMMDD" in the same directory. :)

What I usually do when I work with software that doesn't support
including and yet has a huge configuration, is to write a little Make-
file with a default target that does whatever needs to be done to
concatenate my set of config files. For some things, I even abuse the
gcc C preprocessor. If the application supports it, you could also
have a "test" target that starts the app with a config check option.

In particular, if you have a seperate directory for each of your
daemons, you can put Makefile, includes, maybe some README and the
actual config file (plus above mentioned backup copies) in the same
place.

Real includes would be slightly better, but this works very well for
many applications.

Regards,
  Gregor.

-- 
Gregor Binder  <gbinder@sysfive.com>  http://www.sysfive.com/~gbinder/
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