Buffering is now off by default in metalog installations, so the following should be removed from the mips installation guide: Important: Metalog flushes output to the disk in blocks, so messages aren't immediately recorded into the system logs. If you are trying to debug a daemon, this performance-enhancing behavior is less than helpful. When your Gentoo Linux system is up and running, you can send metalog a USR1 signal to temporarily turn off this message buffering (meaning that tail -f /var/log/everything/current will now work in real time, as expected), and a USR2 signal to turn buffering back on again. If you want to disable buffering permanently, you can change METALOG_OPTS="-B" to METALOG_OPTS="-B -s" in /etc/conf.d/metalog.
Stuart: This covered in your updated handbook by chance?
I've just had a look, but can't find any reference to buffering in the current (or even the 2004.2) MIPS handbooks. I certainly do remember seeing it in previous editions of the guide, however, I'd say this disappeared from CVS quite some time ago, prior to the 2004.2 release. (23:18) stuartl@beast en $ grep -iR "Metalog flushes output to the disk in blocks, so messages aren't immediately recorded into the system logs." * ^^ It certainly isn't in my CVS repository. ;-)
Was just looking for metalog bugs and found this one. Can't see any references to that paragraph either, guess it can be closed?
I was unable to find any occurence of this in current English docs except for doc/en/virt-mail-howto.xml.
Most docs apparently updated by now. Closing.
