On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 08:58:40PM -0400, Ding Yi Chen wrote:
You still have not addressed the third party programs and scripts that monitor /var/log/messages
A) If someone is installing a program that expects this file, they can also install rsyslog.
B) Fedora, RHEL, and most Red Hat derived distributions use /var/log/messages, but not all do -- for example, Rocks (common in HPC) breaks out syslog messages into individual files per facility. Debian and Ubuntu? Totally diferent. (/var/log/syslog)
So, these third-party scripts need to be flexible anyway. I don't think this is a very strong point in the conversation.