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

[walt]

On 09/22/2014 08:50 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
 On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:41 PM, walt w41...@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.

Thanks, Rich and Canek.  I fixed the problem by accident while trying
to debug it.

I used systemctl to stop and restart systemd-journald, thinking I might
see some useful error messages.  But when systemd-journal started up
again the journal file was back in /var/log/journal where I want it :)

No idea why rebooting the machine didn't do the same thing.

Thanks.

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

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 10:27 AM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote:

 I used systemctl to stop and restart systemd-journald, thinking I might
 see some useful error messages.  But when systemd-journal started up
 again the journal file was back in /var/log/journal where I want it :)

 No idea why rebooting the machine didn't do the same thing.


Are you sure that it is solved, and that the problem won't recur on
the next reboot?

If it does, my next question (an educated guess, but a guess) would be
whether you're using an initramfs, and if so which one.  Dracut in
particular launches journald, but it should move its output to
/var/log/journal after pivoting to the new root.  It is actually nice
because your log contains early boot data which of course would not be
present in syslog unless it ended up in the ring buffer.  However,
perhaps something is going wrong with that.  I'd also look at anything
that might be causing issues with /var/log/journal when journald is
launched, such as that directory being on an unmounted filesystem and
there not being some dependency that causes journald to notice.
Systemd is pretty smart about spotting mount dependencies, but I've
seen it make mistakes in unusual configurations and I don't know what
the full logic is.

--
Rich