Problem with the log file and /dev/null

[ogarcia]

Recently, I have been getting this error in the log and, when accessing via the web, on the website: [cInt] WARNING: Directory /dev is full, MLDonkey logdirectory partition full, redirect log to RAM.

Many of us, when starting mldonkey with systemd, have configured the log file to be /dev/null at startup (/usr/bin/mlnet -log_file /dev/null -pid /run/mldonkey), and possibly due to some recent change in the Kernel, this error is now appearing. From my point of view, and seeing how modern systems work, it might be a good idea to put some kind of flag that disables logging to the file, or simply does so if the user passes /dev/null.

[carlonluca]

Are you sure this used to work? File is not necessarily a path. In the code, I see this:

lprintf_nl (_b "Logging in %s") ( Filename.concat file_basedir !!log_file);

which seems to suggest it expects a file name or a relative path. The file is opened like this:

let oc = open_out_gen [Open_creat; Open_wronly; Open_append] 0o644 !!log_file

ocaml spec is not 100% clear on this, but I suspect file name here is relative to the working dir, but the working dir is changed during mldonkey startup:

Unix.chdir file_basedir;

So you could probably fix this by using a path relative to the base mldonkey path.

However, I noticed this in the code:

  if not (keep_console_output ()) then
    if !!log_file = "" then 
      begin
        lprintf_nl (_b "Option log_file is empty, disable logging completely...");
        lprintf_nl (_b "Disabling output to console, to enable: stdout true");
        log_to_file stdout;
        close_log ()
      end

so, if I try -log_file "", I do not see the log file anymore.

If this was true, I could update docs a bit with these details.

[ogarcia]

I hadn't noticed this issue before, and in fact, that configuration has been set up that way for years on Arch Linux.

In any case, I've since switched to Rucio, and I think I fixed it back then by setting -log_file "".