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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."
That's one of the advantages of Linux: RedHat can go their own way without needing the rest of us to buy in, and without really messing things up for us. If they provide a reasonable API, it'll either be compatible with syslog with a simple library substitution or we'll quickly see a wrapper library that allows programs to use either syslog or Journal without needing code changes.
I think going to binary's a bad idea, myself. The fewer tools you need working to find out what the error is, the easier it is to debug and fix the problem. But let RedHat try this and see how it works, and then we can decide once we've got some real-world data to compare.
When everything else is failing ... you still need to be able to dig into the the syslogs reliably no matter what! One little hiccup and you can easily lose everything in most binary type implementations, while at worst you see a little garbage in the syslogs!
Keep on fragmenting each distro ... at a certain point, people will just get tired of distro-hopping and dump the whole mess.
And people ask when the Year f the Linux Desktop will be. It's things likie this, and the constant breakage because of change for the sake of change or to "be different", rather than focusing on stability, that drive people to non-free vendors.
Not that it bothers me, but in forums people are quick to point out that they think Fedora's choice of kernel numbering is stupid. I mention I'm on 2.6.41.1-1.fc15.x86_64, and the first response is, "that kernel doesn't exist." (And yes, Fedora will move to the standard numbering scheme with 17 if I'm not mistaken)
I've found most of RH's decisions to do something their way is to prevent problems down the road. Same for kernel numbering, it was supposedly to prevent repo errors. I don't know for certain, but I'd expect this to also be the case here.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
This is just whining by some guy who wrote a log analyzer that will no longer be necessary.
QNX has had a simple structured log daemon for years. Reading their log never tails off into junk; you always get a clean, current last record. Their solution even works on diskless systems. In many real-time applications, logs are transmitted to some remote location, rather than being kept on each local machine.
It's almost like there are people reading the article before they post! That way lies madness!!
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Is he not aware how terrible syslog is? syslog is ancient and has several series flaws from security to just stupid limitations. It should have been replaced ages ago.
You will also be stuck with all the good choices they make.
Reading what they are proposing it seems that is actually a very good idea. When you get out of hobbyist and small environments and into environments with more demanding requirements about security auditing the traditional syslog has not cut it for years anymore. The first step in many environments is usually to rip it mostly off and replace with some more or less proprietary environment.
The new ideas such as improving the reliability of log shipping, reducing possibilities towards tampering, and improving chances for more advanced log analysis are really awesome things - especially for people who are serious about their logging. Syslog and its text format are legacy poison and it will be good to see them die and vanish. Hopefully that happens fast.
Also, keep in mind that that RedHat is still open sourcing that stuff. They will provide tools and APIs - as they require those also themselves.
That is probably the only time I've ever heard Microsoft's system logging compared favorably with anything. In my many years of administering systems, I have yet to ever get a useful piece of information out of any of those logs. It's like there's a requirement somewhere that only useless messages are allowed to be logged, and anything that might help an administrator (like an error message when something crashes for instance!) must never appear. Even if the error is something stupid like a permissions issue, you don't get a Linux like "Permission denied on c:/blah/blah/blah", at most you'll get a "An error occurred" or other worthless message.
I read the internet for the articles.
Innovation is fine. Invention is better, but if you can't have that then innovation makes a decent replacement. However, Unity isn't really inventive or innovative, and attempting to force someone to use one DWM is definitely a regression.
You are confusing change/novelty with creativity. They're not the same.
And, yes, there SHOULD be push-back. Once it goes past the early adopters, it will make its way to the Real World(tm) where the REAL critics hold multi-million dollar contracts in one hand and a fine sherry in the other. Those critics know nothing about the value of technology, but they know the price of everything, especially that of technology. You WANT the flaws ironed-out before then. You WANT to have put the software not just through the reliability and quality tests but also through the user acceptability tests and the PR tests. You WANT well-tempered systems, honed to damn-well near perfection.
Because, in the end, without those multi-million dollar contracts, the Ubuntus and the Red Hats of the world simply aren't going to bother. There won't be any development at all if we lose the big players at this stage. Linux isn't a garage development project any more, or hadn't you seen the kernel contribution stats on LWN? We NEED the corporations to want to invest not just the time and money they're spending now but more of it. And we won't get that without the PHBs.
Do the PHBs care about Unity or loggers? Directly, no. They care about image and if the unwashed masses turn away from Linux, that's bad image. If there's a security flaw, that's major bad image. If it costs more for the developers to do the same amount of work because of added inefficiencies, especially when the shareholders are baying at the door, that's lethal image. Doesn't matter if Windows would be worse, PHBs won't think like that. Linux is a gamble and it HAS to pay and pay big.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The issue is based on what you need in different scenarios and to meet that I can't see anything wrong in doing both writing to syslog and a database.
Why do both? In larger systems the amount of data is difficult to cross reference and analyse as files due to the amount of sources, size of data, tools to visualise it all, etc. Writing syslog data to centralised syslog services that do use database backends to centralise logs and query/report against them are a key tool in these scenarios. Its one of a number of interfaces you have to analyse what is taking place on your systems.
However, I'd rather use the simplest method of getting log information out of a system if I'm going to use it for debugging an odd situation. There are situations where the overhead of writing to a database or a write remote data might fail and cause no debug information to be written. I'd rather a simple logging system locally.