[NTLUG:Discuss] /dev/log?

Richard Cobbe cobbe at directlink.net
Wed Jun 21 18:55:01 CDT 2000


Greetings, all.

Just had a brief power failure here.  My system appears to be fine after a
reboot and an fsck, but there are a couple of things I'm unclear on.

When I first booted after the power was restored, the system ran fsck and
emitted a couple of error messages saying something on the order of
"setting file type of /dev/log to 6", and one of the same for /dev/printer.

So, my questions:

1) What's /dev/log used for?  /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt
   claims it's the "syslog local socket", but that's not entirely
   informative.

2) What's it supposed to be?  ls -l /dev/log returns
    srw-rw-rw-    1 root     root            0 Jun 21 18:21 /dev/log

   Is that right?  It's obviously a socket, but are permissions and
   ownership OK?

3) What does "setting filetype to 6" accomplish?

4) On RH, /dev/log is part of the dev package.  I ran an rpm -V dev, and it
   appears to think that /dev/log is OK, minus an MD5 sum error, which I'm
   guessing isn't a problem.

   However, I also got the message about /dev/printer, which doesn't appear
   to be owned by any RPMs.  What's this?  devices.txt says "lpd local
   socket", which is as informative as the other one.

   Oh, and:

    srw-------    1 root     root            0 Jun 21 18:21 /dev/printer

If it matters, I'm running RH6.2, with kernel 2.2.16.  /dev is, as you
probably figured, on an ext2 fs.

Thanks,

Richard




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