Installing and Administering Internet Services

42 Chapter2

Installing and Conﬁguring Internet Services

Conﬁguring Logging for the Internet Services

This section tells you how to complete the following tasks:

• “To Conﬁgure syslogd” on page 42

• “To Maintain System Log Files” on page 43

• “To Conﬁgure inetd Connection Logging” on page 43

• “To Conﬁgure ftpd Session Logging” on page 44

To Conﬁgure syslogd

The Internet daemons and servers log informational and error messages

through syslog. You can monitor these messages by running syslogd.

You can determine the type and extent of monitoring through syslogd’s

conﬁguration ﬁle, /etc/syslog.conf.

Each line in /etc/syslog.conf has a “selector” and an “action”. The

selector tells which part of the system generated the message and what

priority the message has. The action speciﬁes where the message should

be sent.

The part of the selector that tells where a message comes from is called

the “facility”. All Internet daemons and servers, except sendmail, log

messages to the daemon facility. sendmail logs messages to the mail

facility. syslogd logs messages to the syslog facility. You may indicate

all facilities in the conﬁguration ﬁle with an asterisk (*).

The part of the selector that tells what priority a message has is called

the “level”. Selector levels are debug, information, notice, warning,

error, alert, emergency, and critical. A message must be at or above

the level you specify in order to be logged.

The “action” allows you to specify where messages should be directed.

You can have the messages directed to ﬁles, users, the console, or to a

syslogd running on another host.

The following is the default conﬁguration for /etc/syslog.conf:

mail.debug /var/adm/syslog/mail.log

*.info,mail.none /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

*.alert *.alert /det/console root

*.emerg *