Hi list, this is a question about named and syslog and how they interplay. My named is instructed to log via a syslog channel (local0) and it works fine. The relevant flags of rc.conf.local are
syslogd_flags="" named_flags="" In the output of ps I see that syslogd runs as syslogd -a /var/named/dev/log -a /var/empty/dev/log I wonder how this is done. syslog and named are two separate processes that don't basically care about each other (right?). So how does the '-a /var/named/dev/log' get into syslog's flags and who created /var/named/dev/log - named or syslog? Oh ... /etc/rc did. OK, syslogd_flags _do_ care whether named is enabled. (Although my question is now answered by just asking the question, I will leave it here for others who go this way.) A similar question I have: I use postfix. After make install, one of the things the package's "postfix-enable" script asks me to do is to add '-a /var/spool/postfix/dev/log' to syslogd_flags. That's because postfix is a(n optional) package, and as such is not taken into consideration in /etc/rc - unlike named, which is part of the system. Right? One final question: I removed /var/spool/postfix/dev/log now, removed '-a /var/spool/postfix/dev/log' from syslogd_flags, and rebooted. Postfix still logs as it is supposed to, although /var/spool/postfix/dev/log is not there now. So why does '-a /var/spool/postfix/dev/log' need to be added to syslogd_flags? (The same seems to work without it.) Thanks Jan