mail.log dead

[Anonymous]

wonderful. if there’s anybody who reads these, I could use help restarting my mail.log.

in the course of attempting to get sendmail or postfix working (still, neither do), I chose to delete my mail.log file, to purge all the invalid tests.

now the file doesn’t generate.

some idiot suggested running:

syslogd restart

but, that’s no a function of the syslogd command:

man syslogd
syslogd [-d] [-f config_file] [-m mark_interval] [-p log_socket] [-u]

I’ve had lots of suggestions by unix people on a lot of topics, I think a total of 2 have been *correct* suggestions. Unix ‘experts’ don’t seem to know their OS afterall.

can *****anybody***** help me with getting mail.log restarted? really, is there *****anybody***** even out there, I haven’t had a single response on this server. I’m starting to think this is a cobweb.

[Camelot]

Sheesh, Bob. Chill out.

You’ve posted multiple negative comments about the lack of response on this board – within about 5 minutes of posting your question.

Man, what do you expect? There are some very talented people here, but most people don’t spend their lives hitting reload so they can see the next question milliseconds after it comes in.

Now, as to your specific problem, mail logs are handled by syslog.

/etc/syslog.conf should have a line like:

[b:419f32c1dd]mail.* /var/log/mail.log[/b:419f32c1dd]

which tells syslog to log all mail messages in /var/log/mail.log.

Now, according to [i:419f32c1dd]man syslog.conf[/i:419f32c1dd]:

[quote:419f32c1dd] o A filename, beginning with a leading slash, which
indicates that messages specified by the selector are
to be written to the specified file. The file will be
opened in append mode if it exists. If the file does
not exist, logging will silently fail for this action.
[/quote:419f32c1dd]

So if the file does not exist, the logs are never updated.

On that basis your solution is simple – create a log file that syslog can write to.

The following command should take care of it for you:

[b:419f32c1dd]sudo touch /var/log/mail.log[/b:419f32c1dd]

[Anonymous]

I’m sorry, you’re right. many things Darwin were blowing up simultaneously, it’s extremely frustrating.

thanks for your answer, it sounds so easy when you say it. unfortunately, about 80% of the ‘assistance’ I’ve received lately re: the unix side of OS X has been misleading, or just wrong. Unix is very unforgiving of ignorance.

the postfix article here has it right:

However, the configuration of Sendmail can drive grown men to tears very quickly.

I finally gave up, wiped the OS, and reinstalled. the console is much quieter now. I’m just now about to embark on postfix install on Jaguar, skipping sendmail altogether.

[Author]

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