brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance - disk footprint

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 07:05:25AM -0400, David Henningsson wrote:
> > Not sure if you had a chance to discuss this last week at UDS,
> Actually, it was discussed in an UDS session related to "fitting Ubuntu 
> on a CD", and Martin Pitt brought it up. I believe we decided to go with 
> keeping /var/log/syslog and drop everything else. The reasoning was that 
> it's good to have some place where everything was logged in order (so 
> you can see the sequence of events), and it's easy to grep if you want 
> something specific.

Oh.  Kind of a non-obvious session in which to have this discussion? :)

Does this proposal include keeping /var/log/auth.log separate?  There are
several logs that are currently written to disk synchronously that lose this
characteristic if we do "one big logfile"; namely, /var/log/auth.log,
/var/log/mail.err, and /var/log/news/news.{crit,err}, each of which we have
a good reason to want to be recorded in the event of a system crash.

Otherwise, using /var/log/syslog gives similar results as eliminating
/var/log/syslog and using a split layout, with the main differences being
vgrep support and finger compatibility.  So while I would personally prefer
the split layout, I don't feel too strongly about this.

> >   /var/log/kern.log: everything kernel-related; separated out because this
> >     can be quite verbose and is usually orthogonal to what we log elsewhere.
> Isn't this already provided in /var/log/dmesg?

/var/log/dmesg is a boot-time log of the current dmesg ring buffer - it
doesn't provide an ongoing log of kernel messages.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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