Re: xconsole messages

[Bill Hogan <bhogan@rahul.net>]

"GM" == Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:

  GM> "GM" == Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:
  GM> Does stuff get written to the files in /var/log and not to the xconsole?

  GM> On Thu, 29 Feb 1996, Bill Hogan wrote:
  >> Exactly.
  >> Here is my /etc/syslog.conf:
  >> 
  >> # cat -etv /etc.syslog.conf
  >> -------------------------------quote ---------------------------------
  >> (..lines deleted..)
  >> auth.*;daemon.*;mail.*;news.crit;news.err;news.notice;*.=debug;*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;cron.none^I|/dev/xconsole$
  >> ------------------------------- unquote ------------------------------

   [...]

  GM> Steve Early pointed out that 
  >> When syslogd finds it can't write to a named pipe (because the pipe has 
  >> nothing listening at the other end, for example) it just starts ignoring 
  >> it. When you send it a SIGHUP it will reopen the pipe and start writing 
  >> to it again.

  >> As long as xconsole gets started reasonably soon after syslogd (eg. in 
  >> the Xsetup_0 script for xdm) you should be ok.

  GM> I'm not at my machine right so can't check, but I remember that the max
  GM> size of a named pipe is 8k.  After that, syslogd will of course stop
  GM> writing.  Apparently it doesn't start writing again, even though its
  GM> writes would succeed.

  GM> That's pretty reasonable behaviour.  If syslogd would start writing to
  GM> the pipe again once it could, there would be missing messages (unless
  GM> syslogd saves them, yuk!).  Better to let the user restart the logging
  GM> with a SIGHUP.


     This works for me (at leasm from an xterm prompt):

	# xconsole -file /dev/xconsole &
	# kill -SIGHUP `cat /var/run/syslog.pid`

     Neat.

     Thanks.

     Cheers,
      Bill