On Sun, 02 Oct 2016 22:45:00 -0600 "Theo de Raadt" <dera...@openbsd.org> wrote:
> > Why is it in /var/cron/log and not /var/log/cron by default? To me > > it makes more sense to have it all in /var/log/, but given it has > > been the default for several years, is there a reason (other than > > historic) that the default is like that? > > That dates back to more than 20 years actually. > > Back in the CSRG days, a lot of new daemon imports got their own /var > directories for reasons we can only guess at. So it appears this is merely historic then. > > > Is there any harm or issue with setting the log location > > of cron logs to /var/log/cron instead, or is it best to leave it > > in /var/cron/log? > > You can do whatever you want. > > Before we talk about changing this, we must know what the downsides > are. Indeed; I was wondering whether there are any issues/downsides with changing this. I have changed this for the last 5 years without any adverse effects on my end, but I only have done this on about 8 different machines, with different purposes. > > > I am interested to know as I keep /var/log in a separate UFS > > partition mounted with rw,softdep,noatime,nodev,noexec,nosuid to > > store all the syslog logs, and /var/cron/log is the odd one out > > here. > > With softdep??? That is completely insane. So clearly you don't > actually care to have the contents of logs after a crash -- since > softdep is quite likely to lose data buffers during circumstances like > memory pressure, etc etc. > > That's the kind of comment that leads me to take bug reports less > seriously in the future... diagnostic logs which would have solved > the problem, will have been lost INTENTIONALLY. And then we get > asked for help? Crazy. > Thank you for that information; The impression I got about softdep was that it guarantees file system integrity so fsck is not needed. I have softdep enabled on all the partitions as per this: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#SoftUpdates I guess it is time for me to evaluate my setup again.
