G'day, Since around the beginning of the month, I've been encountering a problem with our server (glenstorm, Ubuntu 8.04), where apps that attempt to write out logs to /dev/log will hang for 5 or so minutes.
Most notably PAM gets affected, which makes ssh'ing in or using sudo a _very_ lengthy process. Also BIND was unresponsive, I guess anything that writes to the logs would have been. I only found out a workaround yesterday thanks to Mick Pollard (lunix), who suggested I use strace. Apps like sudo would connect() to /dev/log (which I presume is a UNIX socket), and use send() to write the actual log. The apps were hanging on send(), not connect(). Eventually, I've found that this only occurs if syslogd is running. While an app is hanging, a `killall syslogd` will instantly un-freeze it. `fuser -u /dev/log` reveals that indeed, syslogd listens on /dev/log. Funny thing is, if I restart syslogd, and do things that write to the log, it works fine. I can see the log entries coming through in syslog, and it's all good. Just after a few hours, it conks out and starts hanging. I am not sure if the actual syslogd process is locked up, or what. Oh, and none of my filesystems are full. That was one of the first things I checked. :) Any idea why syslogd is behaving as such? Jeremy.
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