Re: [gentoo-user] I don't seem to have a system log. Help, please!

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 5:06 AM, Matthias Hanft <mh@hanft.de> wrote:
>
> And (from what I have heard) if you use systemd instead of
> openrc, there are no syslog files at all - you have to export
> them (from some binary database) manually to some human-
> readable format. But I don't know much about that - never
> used systemd on any Gentoo Linux yet.

You don't have to export them from anything unless you need their
content in a text file.  If you just run "journalctl" that is the
equivalent of typing cat /var/log/messages.  If you do want to parse
them with an external tool then you get your choice of several text
formats and json.

And yes, you can also run syslog, though I never really got the point
of that.  The value of the journal is that you capture full metadata
for your log entries and you can just query it vs having to parse
undelimited text files.  Heck, it seems like half the enterprise
monitoring tools start out by grabbing that log file that has
discarded most of the context and then putting it in a database and
attempting to re-create it all.

-- 
Rich