Re: [gentoo-user] syslog-ng: how to read the log files

[Jan Sever]

On 02/18/2015 12:13 AM, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 February 2015 22:51:55 Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> On Tuesday 17 February 2015 20:41:06 Matti Nykyri wrote:
>>>> On Feb 17, 2015, at 20:26, lee <lee@××××××××.de> wrote:
>>>> how do you read the log files when using syslog-ng?
>>>> The log file seem to be some sort of binary that doesn't display
>>>> too
>>>> well in less, and there doesn't seem to be any way to read them.
>>>
>>> This was discussed earlier on this list... Actually what syslog-ng
>>> produces is plain text. There seemed to be a bug that creates some
>>> binary (i.e. unreadable characters) and that causes less to consider
>>> files to be binary and show them incorrectly.
>>
>> Yes, that was me. I found that something had marked /var/log/messages
>> as a binary file. There's nothing in it that can't be read, no
>> mysterious characters or anything; it's just marked as binary. All
>> you have to do is to move it, then cat it back into place. I did that
>> with no ill effects.
>
> Actually, this is what I did, as I reported here on 26/12:
>
>> 1.    Boot rescue system and mount main system
>> 2.    # cd /mnt/main/var/log
>> 3.    # mv messages messages.bin
>> 4.    # strings messages.bin > messages
>> 5.    # rm messages.bin
>> 6.    Reboot.
>

When I had similar problem, I changed threaded(yes) to threaded(no)
in syslog-ng.conf and the problem disappeared. Maybe it helps you too.

-- 
Jan Sever