[syslog-ng] syslog-ng hanging?

[Nate Campi]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 10:38:05AM +0100, Tony Davis wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I recently converted our RedHat EL servers (Release 3 Update 6) form the
> sysklog package to syslog-ng. On some of the servers syslog-ng appears
> to be occasionally hanging, i.e. messages stop getting written to the
> various log files. This also has a knock on effect of stopping logins,
> cron jobs hanging, etc, presumably because they are waiting to write to
> a log file. I read in the archives that this can be caused by something
> else using /dev/log but there's no other syslogd or minilogd processes
> running and lsof gives the following:
>  
> COMMAND    PID USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
> syslog-ng 1384 root    5u  unix 0xf778c880      1703 /dev/log
> syslog-ng 1384 root    6u  unix 0xf777e8c0      1715 /dev/log
> 
> I'm using the RedHat conf file bundled in the contribs directory that
> comes with the source code.
 
A while back I had problems with a ppp interface coming up and down
(when using ppp over ssh for a temporary VPN) because a debian script in
/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/ restarted postfix every time the interface came up. 

Something about the interaction between chrooted postfix and syslog-ng
(and maybe my kernel version?) caused /dev/log to get hung up and the
system would become unusable. I simply removed the postfix restart
script and all has been well ever since.

I have no idea what's causing your problem, but thought it worth
mentioning what I'd seen in the past.
-- 
Nate

"The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The
mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking
man." - B. F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement