20010820: Not writing to ldmd.log - our solution

>From: Jim Koermer <address@hidden>
>Organization: Plymouth State College
>Keywords: 200108202112.f7KLCq107553 ldm syslog

Jim,

We have not responded to your original posting since a number of folks
here are out on vacation at the moment.

>For several years, we have had problems on our machines (running
>FreeBSD) in getting the ldm to write to the ldmd.log, even though
>everything else always worked superbly. Last week, we installed
>ldm-5.1.4 on our newest server and we still had this problem. Everything
>worked fine except for the ability to write to ldmd.log file.

I seem to recall setting up snow to correctly log ldm-mcidas decoder
output, but that may have been done by specifying the ldm log file
directly and not going through syslogd.

>In doing some more testing and looking for solutions for getting the
>ldmd to write to the ldmd.log file, we discovered that ldmd would write
>to the logfile if we started rcp.ldmd from the command line by
>specifying the log path/file, but not using ldmadmin.  As a result, we
>were able to modify ldmadmin ever so slightly, so that now it works.

In this case, you are telling rpc.ldmd to write to a particular
log file.  This is different from having syslogd handle logging.

>Here is the important diff comparisons between the non-working ldmd.log
>logger and working one, when starting the ldm with ldmadmin:
>
>%diff ldmadmin.ori ldmadmin
>
>642c642
><     $cmd_line .= " -q $pq_path $ldmd_conf > $pid_file";
>---
>>     $cmd_line .= " -l $log_file -q $pq_path $ldmd_conf > $pid_file";
>
>
>All it took was the addition of the "-l $log_file" to the $cmd_line
>specification. It appears that ldmadmin was not automatically passing
>this information onto rpc.ldmd, even if we specified the logfile info as
>an option with ldmadmin. 

That is correct.  The design of the loggin was to run the rpc.ldmds and
let them write to the system logging facility, syslogd.  By configuring
syslog.conf, one can then setup logging to any file desired.  This
way of doing things is more flexible than specifying which file to
log to on the command line.

>I thought that I would pass this on, since this problem has off and on
>eaten up many hours of my time over the past several years and the
>solution for us turned out to be so simple--argh!!!.

When the appropriate "warm body" is around to look at this, I am sure
that we can help you setup your syslog.conf file so that you can use
the unmodified ldmamdin script included with the LDM distribution.
Since we don't have an operational FreeBSD machine here at the UPC,
it would be most helpful if we could get a login to your system.
I once had such a login, but after the hack episode some months
ago, I changed my login and promptly lost it (whouldn't you know).
If the root password is still the same, then all I would need to
get on is the password for my account _if_ it is the same as
the one on snow (or if the machine in question is snow).

Tom