Ubuntu
firestarter package

Firestarter failed to open the system log

Asked by Mannex

Installed Firestarter 1.0.3 under 11.04. Firestarter reports error on startup:

 Failed to open the system log
 No event information will be available.

As predicted by the message, there is no event logging. Why can't it access the logs? Also, Log File Viewer reports errors attempting to open almost every log file. Both are being run as root, so why the problem? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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Ubuntu firestarter Edit question
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Solved by:
Keith Taylor
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Have you logged a bug?

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Best Keith Taylor (t-launchpad-taylorz-org-uk) said : 		#2

Its not a bug, a feature :)

There is a missing file from older Ubuntu distributions.

It looks like Ubuntu 11.04 installs rsylogd rather than syslogd. This uses the file /etc/rsyslog.conf which references the file configuration /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf.

You can edit this file and change the lines commented out that create the relevant logfile

#*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;\
# auth,authpriv.none;\
# cron,daemon.none;\
# mail,news.none -/var/log/messages

to

*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;\
        auth,authpriv.none;\
        cron,daemon.none;\
        mail,news.none -/var/log/messages

and then restart rsyslog or reboot

Hope this help
--

Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

A missing file is a bug. The package should install and create the files needed so that the app can work.

Please site this as a fix and the package will get updated to do this automagically

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Mannex (russ-mannex) said : 		#4

Thanks for the responses. My configure file already had the old section commented out, but there was no replacement section for messages, so I added it. As soon as my machine is done doing some other mundane and uninterruptable things, I'll reboot and let y'all know how it goes!

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Mannex (russ-mannex) said : 		#5

OK, making the changes above fixed it for me. Of course, it's still a bug :)

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Mannex (russ-mannex) said : 		#6

Thanks Keith Taylor, that solved my question.

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Mannex (russ-mannex) said : 		#7

Please note that this is still broken in 11.10.

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joopie (krusty-the4clown) said : 		#8

And still in 13.04