Tue, 04 Apr 2006
Logging to /dev/console
I am upgrading a front-end server of our cluster (which runs
linux-ha.org heartbeat
and ldirectord), to a new AMD64-based system. While playing
with new version of ldirectord, I have found that it is
acting a bit strange. It does not respond to SIGTERM, and it
does not print anything to its log file. I does, though, set up the kernel
IP virtual services table correctly.
While trying to debug this issue using strace(1), I have found that
ldirectord opens /dev/console as its standard
output and error output, and some messages are printed only to
STDERR instead of syslog or the log file.
My system has a serial console, and when there is no active terminal connected to the console port, writing to /dev/console simply hangs.
I have reported it to their bugzilla as bug #1180.
However, it seems that the author of ldirectord is not sure
about using /dev/null instead of /dev/console,
even though I was not able to find any single daemon which uses
console as its error output (see the comment #3).
I believe using /dev/console for this purpose is plain wrong. What other arguments should I use to support my view?