It was thus said that the Great Rainer Gerhards once stated:
>
> We currently take the "use a partial config approach". The emergency config
> primarily kicked in when no actions at all were defined. For 6.3.3, I'll
> probably start with stderr only -- I want to get this release out of the
> door. We can improve the system further on. I wonder if a hardcoded
> destination would make sense (like /var/log/emergency.log). But this may be
> unsuitable for some cases. OTOH it is cleaner to terminate the run -- but
> that leaves the system without a logger if not handled correctly.
Many years ago, back when I was in college, I was writing a program for a
friend and wanted to log all errors (this being an MS-DOS system, there was
no syslogd). I had my program log the errors to a file, but then I thought:
what happens when the disk fills up?
My answer: write to the printer [1]. That I could do easily. Then I
thought: what happens when the paper runs out?
My answer: I didn't have one. I couldn't sprew to the "console" because
as soon as my program exited, the console would be cleared [2]. I was
stuck.
But being in college, I thought to ask one of my instructors what to do.
The one I asked had worked at IBM for over twenty years and what he told me
at first shocked me, but later I came to the realization that he was pretty
much correct: "If you don't know how to handle an error, then don't check
for it."
Now, for the issue at hand. A minimum viable configuration (I think)
would be to open "/dev/log" (or whatever the native logging socket it for a
particular system) and to log *everything* to an equivalent of
"/dev/console". End of story. No worries about stderr and upon boot-up or
rsyslogd starting up, it would be noisy enough that someone might see
something.
-spc (Trying to cover every conceivable problem can lead to madness)
[1] My friend ran a BBS system, so the computer and printer were always
on.
[2] Well, technically, the BBS system would regain control and redraw
its screen.
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