[TriLUG] Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change

[Casey Ransom via TriLUG]

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 11:50 AM Wes Garrison via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> Steve and others know a lot more about it than I do, but from my limited
> experience one of the frustrations is that systemd replaces longstanding
> simple things like discrete log files for services with one monolithic log
> file.
>

That's one of the appeals for me. Prior to systemd, I had to know which
file I wanted to examine for some logs. Is it in /var/log/mail?
/var/log/messages? Or maybe that was /var/log/syslog. I'd have to go check
out syslog rules to figure it out or randomly grep /var/log.  Maybe it has
it's own log somewhere else. Now, if i know the service (and if i don't, i
can probably tab complete it), the logs are extremely easy to find while on
the machine.

It's not really one log file, but it is one source of logs. You can dump
there and it will auto rotate/trim so that it doesn't fill the disk and the
output of all the services you run are automatically saved. There's also
loads of metadata in there for exact time stamps, uid, gids so if you are
serious about logs and ship them off system, there's a lot of context that
syslog doesn't have.

And not having to logrotate anymore? huge bonus to me as an ops person.

 -casey