Re: syslogd stopped working

["Richard G. Roberto" <richr@bear.com>]

On Sat, 3 Aug 1996, Dermot Bradley wrote:

> I'm running Debian 1.1 on a machine here and as of a few days ago syslogd 
> has stopped working. If I run the daemon manually it runs for about 30 
> seconds and then stops. I've tried removing the sysklogd package (using 
> the --force option) and re-installing it again to no avail.
> 
> -- 
> Dermot Bradley                                Email: bradley@gpl.net
> Communications Director                       Tel: 01232 560552
> Genesis Project Ltd                           Fax: 01232 560553
> Belfast & Derry, Northern Ireland             WWW: http://www.gpl.net/
> 

I had the same problem and mis-diagnosed it too!  I wound up
upgrading the sysklogd package and thought it was the
answer, but it turns out it wasn't.  Here's basically what
happened on my system:

I went through the install and configured my system to be
called "debian" as the install does if you don't have a nic
card to configure.  I then restored my home directories (I
came over from Slackware) and configs and connected to the
net using ppp.  My ppp connect script updates my /etc/hosts
file with hte new dynamic IP address and changes my hostname
to dummypc.  This was intended to be a temporary setup, but
it worked so I never changed it :).  I was using a template
file to change the hosts file using sed.  The template file
didn't have an entry for "debian" as a valid host.  syslogd
wouldn't run, I'm assuming because it couldn't resolve the
hostname returned by "uname -n" to an IP address.

I changed my script to echo a series of commands to ed and
edit the existing hosts file (with a valid debian entry) and
all seems to work fine.  I don't know for sure if my
diagnosis is right here, but I haven't had any problems
since.  Please check this on your system and let me know if
something similar has happened.  I'm curious to see if that
was really it or not.  What ever name is returned by
"hostname" or "uname -n" (should be the same?) should have a
valid entry in /etc/hosts.

Thanks

Richard G. Roberto
richr@bear.com
201-739-2886 - whippany, nj


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