[syslog-ng] program destination and init??

[Matt Zagrabelny]

Hi,

I've got a question regarding the program destination and how/when it
spawns the program.

I've got a few program destination directives in my syslog-ng config.
When I start the syslog-ng daemon, the program's (of the program
destinations) parents are the syslog-ng daemon. After some amount of
time (perhaps 20 or 30 hours) I get more programs spawned. Some of the
programs have parents that are 'init' (PID = 1). One of my programs is
'vpndb' - see the grep output for an example:

$ ps -ef | grep vpndb
root       610     1 41 Nov23 ?        2-01:29:55 perl /usr/bin/vpndb
root      4036   605  0 06:44 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh -c /usr/bin/vpndb
root      4039  4036  0 06:44 ?        00:00:00 perl /usr/bin/vpndb
root      5231     1 26 Nov24 ?        1-02:09:12 perl /usr/bin/vpndb
root      5322     1  1 Nov27 ?        00:21:26 perl /usr/bin/vpndb
root      5658  1381  0 08:33 pts/4    00:00:00 grep vpndb
root     16167     1 12 Nov26 ?        06:19:10 perl /usr/bin/vpndb
root     26542     1 19 Nov25 ?        14:12:19 perl /usr/bin/vpndb

Above there are 5 vpndb programs with a parent of PID = 1. One of the
vpndb's belongs to syslog-ng.

Two of my other program destinations are "ssh" commands. They exhibit
the same symptoms (multiple programs running with parents of PID = 1).
Hence I don't think this problem is related to the specific program
being executed.

Does anyone have any idea why I am getting multiple programs spawned?
(I presume that syslog-ng is spawning these programs.)

I do have cron jobs that will 'reload' the syslog-ng daemon.

Thanks for any hints.

-matt zagrabelny