14.4 Pitfalls

The syslog(3) library uses datagram sockets for passing information to other hosts. As a consequence, there is no guarantee that all logged information will be received by those other hosts.

When using m4, exercise care to avoid using m4 keywords in unexpected places. For example, attempting to notify a user named dnl in the syslog.conf file causes that name and all the text following on the same line to be lost.

Care should be exercised in using the -X switch as root. No check is made to ensure that the transaction logging file makes sense. It is possible to make a typo and accidentally append transaction data to the wrong file or device.

Not all information is available in syslog(3) output. Some information, such as the number of invocations of sendmail at any given time, is available only via process listing or accounting programs.

Note that syslog will not work properly on Solaris versions 2.1 through 2.3 unless the proper operating system patch is applied. See sendmail/README for information about how to fix this problem.