On Wednesday 11 December 2002 05:40 pm, Brett I. Holcomb wrote:
> I'm going to install Gentoo (as soon as my work schedule permits) and have
> been reading the docs on the website.

Hurrah!

> I notice that several logger options are available - what are the pros and
> cons of each.
>
> Same for cron (I thought there was only one cron <G>).  What's the pros and
> cons of each?

The following represents only MHOs and prejudices.

Vixie Cron: Named, I believe, after Paul Vixie, noted hacker. (Then again, 
he's responsible for BIND, so take that with a pinch of salt). The first UNIX 
cron daemon. Features: allows one to set environment variables, and send 
output to an alternate user.

Dillon's Cron: Matt Dillon, author. Emphasis on rigorous alogorithmic 
correctness and ANSI C compliance. Apparently very fast. No real features, 
the author argues (correctly, IMHO) that environment variables, redirection, 
conditional execution etc. should be done with shell scripts. The standard 
cron for most distributions.

fcron: No idea who or what maintains this. fcron has an entire array of 
conditionals, options and fiddleable things that will make your eyes water. 
Rather big, probably not very fast. I used it for a while, and then got tired 
of wading through a huge man page to figure out how to schedule an 11pm job.

In case you haven't figured out by now, I use dcron, and recommend everyone 
else does too.

And now onto loggers.

sysklogd: Traditional choice. Based on old, old BSD codebase. Has a bad rap 
these days as bieng slow, unreliable under extreme loads, and not providing 
enough sorting features. OTOH, it is about half the size of most of it's 
rivals.

syslog-ng: Sorting. Designed to be fast and reliable. Built from scratch, but 
not totally alien to someone familiar with sysklogd.

metalog: Aggressive buffering, tons of sorting options. Buffering so 
aggressive, the messages don't get to the disk for about 5 minutes, unless 
you force it into unbuffered mode. I tried it for a while when I built my own 
LFS systems, but got tired of it like I got tired with fcron.

msyslog: "Modular syslog". Designed as an infrastructure for modular input and 
output drivers (e.g. to an SQL DB). Always struck me as over-engineering, so 
I never tried it. Besides, it's when I _can't_ start an SQL server that I 
most need syslog.

In summary, I would use sysklogd for an older machine that doesn't run many 
services, syslog-ng for most other things. On a machine that gets hammered 
with messages (a busy webserver, a central logger for many machines), metalog 
could well be interesting, but for mere mortals like us, I don't think so.

You might also be interested in at (sys-apps/at), which allows you to specify 
batch jobs to execute at a given time. Great for setting late night mozilla/ 
kde builds 
-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <kode187 <at> kode187.net>

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