OpenSuSE Tumbleweed Logging

Last year I moved my servers off the 4 year old Solaris based system to Linux running on Hyper-V. During the switch I tried Centos and Scientific Linux (clones of Redhat Enterprise) and it just didn't really click for me.

I considered going to OpenBSD but it's lack of integration into Hyper-V stopped that idea. I tried FreeBSD which I actually did like despite its limitations in the same way (legacy network adapter for example). I left a few services on FreeBSD including Privoxy, TOR and squid; as well as Unbound for DNS and to this day it runs well.

For my email server I wanted more up to date packages and it was only when I discovered OpenSuSE that I found the distribution I had been waiting for. Everything was exactly where I liked and the minimal server install worked very very nicely. So apart from an occasional zypper refresh and update the VM required little if any effort to administer.

In the interim I continued experimenting with distros and unfortunately none of the Debian clones did it for me. Even Mint which people raved about was too flakey and brittle. Finally I found another worthy distro in ArchLinux which I set up as a home NAS and media server. What I loved about it was the concept of rolling release. I hesitated however to base an important email based server on it though.

When I came back to looking at the latest things happening in the OpenSuSE universe I discovered that they had released 13.2 which I considered upgrading to but then Tumbleweed struck my attention; an official rolling release with the latest stable packages. After researching and cloning my 13.1 based machines I decided to try an upgrade/conversion to Tumbleweed and everything went well!

Except logging!!

After typing my usual 'tail -n30 -f /var/log/mail' I received no updates on what was happening at all! I searched online and at first found little if any help. Finally I discovered that OpenSuSE has left syslog and now has systemd journalctl to manage system wide logging. I got the information I needed to make sure the mail systems were working but I still wanted to have the old style logging back. It turns out you can...

By changing /etc/systemd/journald.conf so that ForwardToSyslog=yes is uncommented and installing rsyslog with zypper in rsyslog you can have all your old style logging back.