rsyslog

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 5:39 PM, Bill Oliver <vendor at billoblog.com> wrote:

> So... the statement "Hey, this fedora-as-a-developer's-playground stuff is
> getting in the way of me doing my thing" is not "overtly negative" and it's
> not just an "opinion rant."  It's a *user* talking about *user* issues.
> And the response of "well, if you don't like it, become a developer" isn't
> really a viable answer.

No one said become a developer. There's a clear way to get the same
rsyslog behavior on Fedora 21 Workstation as on Fedora 21 Server. I
just figured this out with a VM and a clean installation of Fedora 21
with current updates via Software.

# dnf install rsyslog

And either reboot, or
systemctl start rsyslog

It's enabled by default upon installation. The configuration files are
the same as on server as far as I can tell. And after the reboot
/var/log/messages contains piles of messages about various things
other than the kernel and appears to match up exactly with what
journalctl returns. Of course the journal could have days or weeks of
stuff in it that /var/log/messages won't get - I don't know how far
back it'll go, maybe just the current boot or the moment you start
rsyslogd, I didn't test any of that.

So  I literally had to do only two things to get back the old
behavior. Anyone else having to jump through more hoops has some
troubleshooting to do, I don't see how anyone else can do that for
you, but I'd say that having to jump through hoops means you may have
found a bug somewhere because it should be this easy. I just did it.


> That doesn't mean that changing things in order to make things "better" is
> bad. It's great.  But it means that it needs to be done in a way that
> doesn't hold *users* and their needs in contempt.

The contempt started from the outset of this thread by the OP for
journalctl. The default behavior of journalctl, with one command, is
already analogous to cat /var/log/messages, which is quite a bit more
typing text. If you can't learn anything new, well, that's... let's
call it unfortunate.

One example of a decoder ring just by a simple Google search:
http://blog.carlos-spitzer.com/2013/12/28/fedora-20-doesnt-include-rsyslog-as-logging-daemon/

I'm not sure how that's a significant adjustment. But if it is, again,
you can dislike journalctl for completely unreasonable reasons, and
absolutely still get rsyslogd working on Workstation.



> Metal car keys have been obsolete for a decade.  But there's a reason we
> still use them.

For an older car, yes, it's the only option. Most cars come with RF
fobs these days, not keys, so now the fob is the only option. My
parents and friends with new cars in the last few years, no keyholes
in the car anywhere, car did not come with a key. It's a fob with a
battery in it. Battery dies, you can't get in your car. It is so.


-- 
Chris Murphy