Can anyone tell me

[Christina Martin]

why during reboot, right after the "Start system message logging daemon" starts I get a message saying "syslogd: unknown priority name "log": Not a ....(can't read the rest because the next service kicks in).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Christina:

I suspect the message is "Not a typewiter". Look in '/etc/rc.log' for the complete message.

If you have a startup script that sources (reads) a standard user profile as, for example):

su - username -c script

...then the 'username' '.profile' will be read in a non-interactive (i.e. no terminal associated with the process) environment leading to the "Not a typewriter".

If so, you can conditionally wrap your 'stty' and 'tset' profile commands with:

# if [ -t 0 ]; then
...

Regards!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

Well, the first thing to do is have a look at the /etc/rc.log file and see what the rest of the message is.

The next thing would be to have a look at /etc/syslog.conf and see if there is a malformed configuration line in there.

If you are unsure about syslog.conf syntax, then take a look at the syslogd man page. For even more information, the syslog man page.

[Christina Martin]

The only thing it says in rc.log is:

Start system message logging daemon
Output from "/sbin/rc2.d/S220syslogd start":
----------------------------
System message logger started

There aren't any error messages concerning this.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

At this point, it's not clear is there is a problem with the syslog daemon (syslogd) or with a process trying to actually send a message to syslogd. Let's divide this puppy into separate tasks.
cd /sbin/init.d
./syslogd stop
./syslog start

If you see error messages then examine /etc/syslog.conf for any extraneous/incorrect entries; if not, then let's test syslogd ourselves.

logger "This is a test"

Now examine "tail /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log" and see if your entry is found. If so, syslogd is working and you have a process sending a malformed message to syslogd.

[Matti_Kurkela]

The message
syslogd: unknown priority name "log"

would seem to suggest that there might be a malformed line in the /etc/syslog.conf file.

In that file, each non-empty non-comment line should begin with a selector which is of the form:
.

The word "log" is not one of the recognized keywords (see "man syslogd"). It might be that a copy/paste operation between windows or some careless editing has split a line.

Also remember that the selector and the log destination fields in the syslog.conf file should be separated by one or more TAB characters, *not* by spaces. A copy/paste operation from one terminal window to another often converts TABs into spaces, and in syslog.conf this is actually harmful.

MK

[Rasheed Tamton · Accepted solution]

grep ' ' /etc/syslog.conf (grep for space in the file)

Replace the spaces with the tab
kill -HUP `cat /var/run/syslog.pid`
or
/sbin/init.d/syslogd stop / start

Or it is always more easy to copy the syslog.conf file from a working system, and modify as per the requirements. Use tabs for the fields.

cp /etc/syslog.conf /etc/syslog.conf.orig
scp from the system
Restart the syslogd

Regards.

[Christina Martin]

Thank you everyone for all your help. It turns out that there was an extra space in the syslog.conf file. Once I removed it, the error message went away.