Syslog and LOG_LOCALn?

[Ben Boulanger]

On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Mark Polhamus wrote:
> Pppd apparently uses LOG_LOCAL2.  (Does anyone know if that is compiled in or 
> in some configuration file that I haven't found?).  Any other examples of 
> popular software that is using one of the local codes?

Cisco's PIX, I believe, uses them.  And if I remember correctly, most 
Cisco stuff follows that same setup.

> I was suprised to learn there were only 24 codes, I just thought the facility 
> identifier would be a string.

24 codes?  Not sure what you mean here - there's:
	auth
	authpriv
	cron
	daemon
	kern
	lpr
	mail
	news
	local0
	local1
	local2
	local3
	local4
	local5
	local6
	local7

and then to each one of those, there's a 8 levels (each lower containing 
the ones above it):
	emergency  	0
	alert  		1
	critical  	2
	error  		3
	warning  	4
	notification  	5
	informational  	6
	debug  		7

So... lets say you really wanted to isolate something... throw it into 
local7.debug and edit your syslog.conf to dump that to a file.  

I believe I've characterized that right... someone please correct me if 
I'm wrong here.

> I'm writing a backup utility.  I think I would be best to use syslog, except 
> maybe for larger output which it could write to a file in /var/log/.  Does 
> that sound right?  I'll make the facility code configurable.

Syslog is incredibly useful for sending messages that aren't critical if 
they're lost (it's a UDP flow when logging remotely).  If you're trying to 
send more than just text messages, you might want to consider something 
different.  If the syslog packet doesn't get to its destination, it 
doesn't throw up an alert that it couldn't get there (to my knowledge).  

Ben

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