[Pdns-users] Docs for setting syslog facility

[Brian Candler]

Hello,

I'm using pdns-recursor 4.0.4-1pdns.xenial from repo.powerdns.com

Following https://doc.powerdns.com/md/common/logging/ I tried to set 
"logging-facility=0", but it had no effect. I could prove this by 
stracing the rsyslogd process, seeing priority <30> = 3*8 + 6 = DAEMON + 
INFO (RFC 3164 sec 4.1.1)

Checking the ps output:

pdns     24373  8.0  0.3 287348 15008 ?        Ssl  09:19   0:00 
/usr/sbin/pdns_recursor --daemon=no --write-pid=no --disable-syslog

Aha: so direct logging to syslog is disabled; systemd is capturing logs 
from stdout and resending them to syslog; and so it requires some 
systemd fu to fix this.

Perhaps some mention of this could be made at 
https://doc.powerdns.com/md/common/logging/ ?  It seems that the 
official xenial package is overriding the documented default behaviour, 
which is confusing.

Thanks,

Brian.

P.S. In the end I found the solution via:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/659267/how-do-i-override-or-configure-systemd-services
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.exec.html

# mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/pdns-recursor.service.d
# cat <<EOS >/etc/systemd/system/pdns-recursor.service.d/override.conf
[Service]
SyslogFacility=local0
EOS

# systemctl daemon-reload
# systemctl restart pdns-recursor

(Note that this still isn't quite the same as logging directly to 
syslog, since *all* messages are logged at 'info' level, regardless of 
severity)