[gentoo-user] mysterious syslog message "."

[Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>]

Hi.

So NetworkManager was giving me lots of debugging output.  Having a look
on Google shows it doesn't have log levels, so my only option (apart
from turning it off) was to redirect its log output to a separate file.
It's growing quickly (remind me to set up logrotate!)

After I've removed NetworkManager from /var/log/messages, I'm left with:
Jan 29 23:45:59 orpheus .: 
Jan 29 23:46:05 orpheus .: 
Jan 29 23:46:11 orpheus .: 
Jan 29 23:46:17 orpheus .: 
Jan 29 23:46:23 orpheus .: 
Jan 29 23:46:29 orpheus .: 

and so on every 6 seconds.  I think the "." is supposed to be the
program name, and obviously after the ":" comes the message "".

Every message seems to exactly correspond to this NetworkManager
message:
Jan 29 23:48:17 orpheus NetworkManager: <WARN>  killswitch_getpower_reply(): Error getting killswitch power: Method "GetPower" with signature "" on interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.KillSwitch" doesn't exist
Jan 29 23:48:17 orpheus NetworkManager: <WARN>  killswitch_getpower_reply(): Error getting killswitch power: dellWirelessCtl (/usr/bin/dellWirelessCtl) not available or executable.

Note the reference to /usr/bin/dellWirelessCtl (which really doesn't
exist!)  If I symlink /usr/bin/dellWirelessCtl to /bin/false, all the
log messages stop and the last one says:

Jan 29 23:49:35 orpheus NetworkManager: <info>  Wireless now disabled by radio killswitch

If I leave the symlink there, NetworkManager won't bring up wireless, so
it's a useless "hack".

I don't really care about any killswitch operation, but I'm interested
in why I'm getting a "." message.  NetworkManager bug or
misconfiguration error?

TIA,
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au>

I do not know myself and God forbid that I should.
		-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe