Keeping Tiger syslogd going

[rwalker]

Not sure where the best forum is for this post because there doesn’t seem to be a forum on syslog issues, and it’s not really a comment for the syslogd article.

There’s a tip at the end of Aaron Adams’ excellent syslogd article (Configuring Tiger’s syslogd to accept logs from external devices) to add the following lines to the end of /etc/daily.local to fix an issue with syslogd that causes it to stop working when /etc/periodic/daily/500.daily is run and sends its kill signal to syslogd:

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
sleep 1
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist

There seems to be something later in the various periodic daily scripts that kills syslogd because this fix didn’t work for me even if put at the end of /etc/periodic/daily/500.daily, and the symptom was that SMTP logging, IMAP logging, and system logging would stop each morning at 3:15 a.m. It’s been an ongoing problem since 10.4.2 and continues with 10.4.3, and has nothing to do with the stuff discussed in Aaron’s article, but his observation and fix pointed me in the right direction.

A “quick and dirty” fix with minimal impact is to put these three “unload, sleep, load” lines not in /etc/daily.local but instead in a new file /etc/periodic/daily/900.daily.local that will be run last in the set of periodic daily scripts. Perhaps a wiser person can figure out where the exact problem is and a better fix, but this does the job and keeps syslogd running.

Russ

[Author]

Posts