Re: [gentoo-user] journald refuses to put log files in /var/log/journal/

["Canek Peláez Valdés" <caneko@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:41 PM, walt <w41ter@gmail.com> wrote:
> My main desktop machine is obviously having a brain fart :(
>
> systemd-journald is allegedly obligated to write its journal files
> to /var/log/journal/ *if* that directory exists, right?
>
> Well, on my three other gentoo ~amd64 machines, that's exactly what
> journald does.
>
> But not on my everyday work machine, oh no.  I'd be daft to expect
> my one main everyday machine to obey the rules, right?
>
> On this machine (the one I'm using now) journald is writing its
> files to /run/log/journal/ instead of /var/log/journal/
>
> # ls -l /var/log/journal/
> total 4
> drwxr-sr-x 2 root systemd-journal-remote 4096 Sep 22 14:39 remote
>
> #ls -l /var/log/journal/remote/
> total 0
>
>
> The *.conf files in /etc/systemd/ are the same on all machines:
> all of the config items are commented out, as sys-apps/systemd
> installed them.
>
> So, why is this particular machine not behaving like the others?

Hi Walt; the relevant documentation is from man 8 systemd-journald:

"By default, the journal stores log data in /run/log/journal/. Since
/run/ is volatile, log data is lost at reboot. To make the data
persistent, it is sufficient to create /var/log/journal/ where
systemd-journald will then store the data."

So, in the failing machine the journal is not flushing its volatile
data to /var. I would suspect a permissions issue. Could you please
post the output from:

# ls -ld /var/log/journal

In my main machine, this is:

drwxr-sr-x 3 root systemd-journal 4096 Oct 28  2012 /var/log/journal

So its 2755; all permissions for root, read and execution (with SETGID
bit on), and read and execution for everyone else. The directory is
owned by root, and it's on the systemd-journal group.

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Profesor de asignatura, Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México