Red Hat's Linux Changes Raise New Questions

itwbennett writes "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."

Comments

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM

- GameboyRMH (bloody post limiter!)

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[epiphani]

Agreed. I submitted this post yesterday, by the lead developer for rsyslogd (the most common syslog daemon in linux these days). He makes the point that most of the complaints made are actually wrong if they'd bothered to look at the last 10 years of development and IETF work around syslog.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[MightyMartian]

MySQL requires the daemon to be running, or at least access to some utility with the MySQL library. If a system has crashed or has reduced functionality due to system problems, a text log that can be scanned with the basic *nix stdio tools is a helluva lot more useful than a binary log.

I hate the Windows eventlog and binary logs in general precisely because they become rapidly less accessible the more issues a system has, which is quite often why you need to delve into syslog anyways. What exactly is the point to reinventing the wheel?