re: PAM

[matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>]

   On a separate note, msyslogd builds happily but uses /dev/log as its
   socket by default. The NetBSD logging functions seem to be expecting
   /var/run/log - symlinking the two work, and you can pass an option to
   msyslog to make it produce /var/run/log instead. What's the preferable way
   to do this?


the point of /var/run/syslog is so that / has no files written at
boot time, given that /var is not /.  infact, some of us now run
with /var/run as an tiny mfs...

not writing to / means that one can have a read-only system, with
only /var/run being required, and this can be located not on the
disk filesystem (it's not preserved between reboots.)


msyslogd should probably have an option to look elsewhere... making
it use /dev/log again would remove the above feature.  (actually,
probably lots of other things break it but why make it worse? :-)


the prior art for syslogd in this case are the -p and -P flags i
added to netbsd a few years back:

-p	Specify the pathname of an log socket.  Multiple -p options
	create multiple log sockets.  If no -p arguments are created,
	the default socket of /var/run/log is used.

-P	Specify the pathname of a file containing a list of sockets
	to be created.  The format of the file is simply one socket
	per line.



FYI: it was basically eventless for the move to /var/run/log.  it
affected people using chroot jails -- but i helped those people 
(the set of which of course includes myself) in even better ways by
adding the -p and -P flags.  :-)