Help! Runaway syslogd...

[Tony Sanders]

paw at eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Pat Wilson) writes:
> For the last two days I've had /etc/syslogd go nuts and start forking 
> copies of itself (filling up the process table along the way).  I don't
The only syslogd fork()'s (other than to make itself a daemon) is when it
wants to do nonblocking I/O to a terminal in wallmsg().  However it
sets a 30 second timeout around the write().

Send it a SIGBUS and poke through the core file and see if you
can find out what tty it was trying to write to.  Perhaps
one of your terminals is in a funny state (doesn't explain
why the alarm() isn't working nor why syslog is trying to
send lots of messages, unless it's a messages saying that syslog
is broken :-).

Try changing your syslog.conf file to log all messages in
/tmp/syslog.debug (or whatever) and see if it's sending lots
of messages, perhaps the message will give you a clue where to
look next.

-- sanders at cactus.org
I am not an IBM representative, I speak only for myself.