From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Mar 20 23:11:31 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D2FA437B720 for ; Tue, 20 Mar 2001 23:11:22 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 87475 invoked by uid 100); 21 Mar 2001 07:11:21 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15032.21529.523652.502956@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 01:11:21 -0600 To: jef moskot Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: qpopper is very noisy In-Reply-To: References: <15031.5419.482618.192130@guru.mired.org> X-Mailer: VM 6.89 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG jef moskot types: > Mike Meyer wrote: > > jef moskot types: > > > I'm using qpopper right now and it's doing fine, but it spits out a line > > > every time it's accessed when I'm logged into the console as root, which > > > gets annoying pretty quickly. > > > > > > Is it possible to turn this behavior off, while still allowing these > > > messages to be reported normally in the log file? > > > > Well, the best way is to not log in as root. > At first I thought you were being a smartass, then I turned my brain on > realized that that's a pretty good workaround. Thanks! There are a number of good reasons not to log in as root: it records who does things if you've got multiple people who use the root password, it makes it less likely you'll try to log in as root on a network session, and it makes it clear that bad login attempts as root are an attack. And yes, it also means you don't get those messages. Personally, the only time I log in as root is to check root messages from syslog.conf. I've even set up systems where it was impossible to log in as root. > > Failing that, you can use syslog.conf to control where the messages > > from syslogd go. The man pages provide some details on this. > I messed around with this originally, even found precisely what I wanted > to do on a web page somewhere, made the change and...nothing happened. > Sorry, I can't remember the details of that attempt, but I'll try again. Did you restart or reconfig syslogd? > At any rate, do you think it would be a good idea to contact the author of > the port, to turn this behavior off by default? Is there any sensible > reason to spam the root operator with non-critical messages? It's not really the ports behavior; it's probably logging the access at "notice" level, message transfer at "info" level, and details at the "debug" level, which makes perfect sense. The default syslog.conf logs *.notice to root, so any root login gets those messages. Just deleting the "*.notice;... root" and restarting syslog.conf should stop it, but it might stop other messages as well. In theory, something like "*.notice;mail.none;... root" will also stop it, but syslog.conf and theory have a poor track record on agreement. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message