[OpenAFS] Proposed changes for server log rotation

[Russ Allbery]

Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com> writes:

> Of course that requires that there be a log rotation tool.  I don't
> think that OpenAFS by default should fill the disk partition simply
> because it is permitted to run for years without restarts and the admin
> has not configured a log rotation tool.

This is the main reason why I think syslog logging should be the default
for new installations somehow.  I do realize that there are bad syslogds
in some places, and if one wants full audit logging and debugging some
syslogds can't cope.  And I don't want to force syslog on people who
really don't want it, nor do I really want to change behavior on upgrades
very badly.

But every UNIX system has syslog out of the box, and every other major
open source server application that I can think of other than Apache and
Java applications uses syslog by default, precisely because it's already
set up to do something sane, rotate logs, etc.  That's been the case for
decades.  AFS has always been exceptionally weird in that it does its own
(somewhat annoying) logging rather than using the facility everyone else
uses.

And we just don't log that much stuff by default.  If you're turning on
huge amounts of logging, you may want to switch to something special, but
for the amount of stuff we log by default, syslog would be perfectly fine
and would probably make it much easier for server administrators to find
the logs (since they'd be in the same place they look for logs for
everything else they run).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>