the Debian/Ubuntu hosts should run our zephyr logger

[geofft]

We really have no syslog monitoring of the directors or the hosts. This should be fixed.

[ezyang]

One of the primary difficulties with this is that our hosts run Debian, and installing syslog-ng to match our hosts will break metapackages. rsyslog appears to be the future, however, it doesn't directly support our d_zroot.pl script. Fixing this is several yaks, as discussion on -c sipb -i logging on June 6, 2010. In particular, support for shelling out to another program to handle log messages is done via the omprog plugin, which is not currently compiled in by Debian due to “​lack of testing”. There is also the possibility of daemonizing d_zroot.pl as a RELP server or setting it up to read from the other end of a named pipe.

[andersk]

Replying to ezyang:

or setting it up to read from the other end of a named pipe.

This is the most obvious thing to do if you want to put ~no effort into it.

[mitchb]

installing syslog-ng to match our hosts will break metapackages

Can you explain this? What metapackage doesn't accept whichever syslogging package you choose? That sounds like a bug to me. Additionally as a side note, "who cares?" because our install process has us match the set of packages on another machine... while I understand it's nice and desirable for the metapackages to be present and have their dependencies satisfied, if we're tying our installed set of packages to that on another server, they only offer so much value.

[andersk]

On Ubuntu, ubuntu-minimal depends rsyslog. Debian doesn’t really have metapackages in that sense (but rsyslog is Priority: important and syslog-ng is Priority: extra).

Dependencies aside, I think the fact that ​Fedora, ​Debian, and ​Ubuntu have all standardized on rsyslog is the most compelling reason to use it; it’s going to get the most upstream attention.

[achernya]

arsenio-hall is currently running the zephyr logger. Since we're currently planning on upgrading the hosts to Debian Squeeze, they too can also run the zephyr logger while we work on porting the script to rsyslog, if we can maintain all the features. However, discussion on zephyr (-i hosts on June 17, 2011 at ~7pm) seemed to conclude that we should stick with syslog-ng because it has more hooks than rsyslog.

[achernya]

The zephyr logger will automatically be installed when using the scripts-vm-host package to autoconfigure a new machine. The configuration package is called scripts-syslog-ng-config.

[achernya]

All of the hosts are now Debian, and automatically get the zephyr logger installed when they are set up. (The zephyr logger is packaged in scripts-syslog-ng-config)