Bug 31277 – metalog + consolelog causes major login problems

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Alexander Kellett 2003-10-16 05:47:39 UTC]

after enabling console logging in my metalog.conf my system went 
completely berzerk (well, okay, thats a slight understatement :)).

seemingly, after having done so all failed logins on a console will
stop all logins from that point on. the agetty with the failed login
locks up. su also stops working.

more detailed: 2.6 kernel, consolelog is to /10, not /dev/console
metalog.conf is otherwise default. removing the consolelog related
lines in the .conf solved the problem almost immediatly.

if a root login is still open one can restart metalog. the missing 
failed logic logs will then appear on the current console (i.e,
just /dev/console, i.e, no consolelog involvement). and after
this logging in will work again, until the next login failure.

i'd say this is probably a major bug in agetty, pam, the kernel
itself (no idea), or metalog. but, more importantly i report it
as a bug with gentoo as the installation docs recommend
the use of metalog, and the .conf has these lines already.

i would suggest the removal of these lines from the .conf,
or some kind of warning that explains the problems that
it can cause.

sorry that i'm unable to delve deeper into the bug itself,
Alex

[Comment 1 Sven Vermeulen (RETIRED) 2003-10-16 09:08:48 UTC]

The docs don't recommend metalogd; they recommend syslog-ng (although some
architectures might recommend metalogd). However this is not for the documentation
team as we shouldn't use the documentation to circumvent bugs.

bugwranglers: assign to the metalogd-peeps perhaps? They can remove the lines
from the configuration file or find out where the problem lays...

[Comment 2 Heinrich Wendel (RETIRED) 2003-10-17 04:31:11 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 8607 ***