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To syslog or not to syslog

Better Logging

Article from ADMIN 19/2014

By Thorsten Scherf

In most cases, log messages are managed by a Syslog server. The Fedora project wants to take a new approach in future releases. This change is to come from systemd's journal.

When I talk to people about system and service management, I often encounter a certain amount of uncertainty when the conversation turns to "systemd." Here, I'll provide a brief introduction and look at the arguments in favor of a new init system. You may have grown accustomed to a SysV-based init process at boot time over the years; however, this system is somewhat long in the tooth and no longer meets today's requirements in a useful way. So, it's time for a successor, which has actually existed for quite some time in the form of Upstart.

Upstart is to a great extent downwardly compatible with the old SysV system and solves many of the old problems. Rather than working through a predefined list of services to be started, Upstart is event-based, meaning that based on certain events, actions then take place. All these Event/Action rules are defined by the administrator or developer of a service in the Upstart configuration files, which is precisely the problem with Upstart. If you do not pay close attention to which events depend on other events, you end up with dependencies that cause services to wait on one another before starting. And, this is exactly the problem you want to avoid, right?

Problem Solved

Lennart Poettering and his team hope to solve this (and other) problems and even go one step further with their implementation of a new init system. The software, which goes by the name of systemd , simply starts all the services in parallel without worrying about dependencies. If a service wants access to another service, the requests are just queued until the desired service is available. This trick, known from Apple's launchd , ensures that a system boots up extremely fast.

On top of this function, systemd, of course, provides many other new features. An interesting aspect is that each process started by systemd ends up in a separate control group

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