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