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Enabling the UNIX Syslog


One of the first places to look for warning or error messages is in the UNIX syslog file. Many UNIX applications, including FacetWin, will log important messages to the various syslog files.

You probably already have a syslog daemon, "syslogd", running on your system, although it may not be actively logging messages. You UNIX manpages on "syslog" should give you more specifics, but here is how to enable the syslog facility on most UNIX systems...

First, find the syslog configuration file, "/etc/syslog.conf". In this configuration file you can define different logging levels which can be directed into different logfiles, but if you just want to catch all the messages (which is especially useful for debugging purposes) then just add the line:

     "/etc/syslog.conf":
     ----------------------------------------
     *.debug			/tmp/syslog
     ----------------------------------------
Use tabs, instead of spaces, for the whitespace between "*.debug" and "/tmp/syslog".

Then create the logfile, "/tmp/syslog" -- the syslog daemon won't log to the file unless it already exists:

     touch /tmp/syslog
The last step is to "refresh" the syslog daemon so it notices the new logging configuration. This is done by sending a "hangup" (HUP) signal to the syslog daemon. The easy way to do this is to do a "kill -1" command with the syslog daemon's process ID (PID) number. You can find the syslog daemon's PID with:
     ps -ef | grep syslogd
or
     ps -aux | grep syslogd
then do:
     kill -1 SYSLOG_PID
At that point you should have your first message(s) logged. It will say something to the effect that the "syslog has restarted". For instance, on SCO OpenServer Release 5:
     May 28 15:19:36 unixbox syslogd: re-initialise
     May 28 15:19:37 unixbox syslogd: restart
If you see something like this in your syslog file, then you know that logging is working.

Note, if you substitute some other full pathname to a logfile for "/tmp/syslog", just consistently use its pathname everywhere above.