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Re: Heads up: persistent journal has been enabled in systemd



On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 9:01:55 PM EST Matt Zagrabelny wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 4, 2020 at 5:15 PM Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> wrote:
> > On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 5:22:15 PM EST Vincent Bernat wrote:
> > >  ❦  4 février 2020 11:30 -08, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>:
> > > >> As a heavy user or Rsyslog features I feel that switching default
> > > >> logging system yields no benefits to say the least.
> > > > 
> > > > As a heavy user, perhaps you're not the target audience for a default?
> > > > You're going to install rsyslog no matter what, since you know it well
> > > > and
> > > > use it heavily.  The only effect of this change on you will be a
> > > > one-line
> > > > change to whatever you use for configuration management for new
> > > > systems.
> > > 
> > > rsyslog even knows how to directly pull logs from the journal, which
> > > gives you access to stuff not logged to syslog (stdout/stderr of service
> > > files, applications logging directly to journal), as well to structured
> > > logs (comm pid, user, unit and more when the service supports journald
> > > directly).
> > 
> > For those of us who aren't customizers of Debian's logging function, it'd
> > be nice to have a clearer understanding of what this changes means.
> > 
> > Today, when, for example, I want to investigate something email related, I
> > look in /var/log/mail.log.
> 
> Random email related journal commands:
> 
> journalctl -u postfix
> journalctl -f -u postfix
> journalctl -b -u postfix
> 
> the -u is for the unit name. the -b is for since boot. man journalctl
> for details.

Not particularly useful IMO.  In /var/log/mail.log I can see log entries from 
all the programs configured to log to the mail facility.  That way I can see 
the interaction between them.  On a typical server that is for sending mail I 
often need to see log entries from postfix, clamsmtp, and dkimpy-milter 
together to understand how a message is (or isn't) making it through the 
system.

Of course the fact that I can't use all the tools available to manipulate text 
files to follow or analyze logs is problematic.  If I'm using journalctl, how 
do I replicate 'tail -f /var/log/mail.loog'?

Note that I'm not asking about some specialized configuration that I've set up.  
All I want to know is how to make it work like Debian works out of the box 
today.

Scott K

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