[syslog-ng] couple install questions

[Evan Rempel]

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:36:00 EDT, Nick Baronian said:
>> I have a RedHat Ent.4 box I want to put syslog-ng on.  Should I remove
>> syslogd (sysklogd) first?
> 
> No.  Careful planning will avoid installing one on top of the other, and
> you want the old syslog around Just In Case.
>  
>>                           If so how do I get syslog-ng to handle the
>> cron (vixie) and initscripts?
> 
> # cd /etc/init.d
> # cp syslog syslog-ng
> # chkconfig syslog off

By using a separate syslog-ng init.d script we found that we sometimes accidentally started syslog
by doing an "/etc/init.d/syslog restart" rather than a "/etc/init.d/syslog-ng restart". No errors get thrown,
but we end up having two processes reading from /dev/log which results in logging stopping for both syslog and 
syslog-ng. Obviously not what we want to happen.

To avoid this you can just make /etc/init.d/syslog start/stop syslog-ng but you run the risk of an up2date replacing the 
/etc/init.d/syslog script when a new version of syslog gets updated.

We found a better approach was to "hack" the /etc/sysconfig/syslog file to add at the end

if [ "$1" != "stop" ]; then
   if [ "$1" != "status" ]; then
     echo "This system runs syslog-ng"
     exit 1
   fi
fi

so that when /etc/init.d/syslog is invoked, this file runs and alerts the user to the fact that syslog-ng has replaced 
syslog-ng on the system. This file is not replaced when syslog is updated. You could add other stuff, such as redirect 
to the syslog-ng startup script. In our environment we wanted to train the sysadmins to use the /etc/init.d/syslog-ng 
script.

If you are interested, I can send you our syslog-ng init.d script.




-- 
Evan Rempel                erempel at uvic.ca
Senior Programmer Analyst        250.721.7691
Computing Services
University of Victoria