Long file names -- truncated?

[Kevin Spicer]

On Sat, 2003-09-13 at 03:25, Julian Field wrote:

>The syslog never goes to a user, so it is nowhere near as important.
>Also,
>to a fair extent that is your syslogd's problem and not mine. I have to
>draw the line somewhere. The real original filename might be useful to
>a
>site admin, I know I would be annoyed if there was *no* way of getting
>at
>the original real name.

Yes, but very long strings of text shouldn't be included in syslog
messages, because a syslog packet (not just the message text) should be
less than 1024 bytes (RFC3164 section 4.0).  There is (AFAIK) no
provision for spanning a syslog message across two parts (presumably as
it uses UDP).  I don't know whether the perl syslog API or various
syslog servers impose this limit, but even if they don't I'd point out
that making a message much longer is likely to exceed the MTU on some
systems, causing problems for those who log to a remote host.

Perhaps a happy compromise is to make the filename the last part of the
log entry then truncate to some sensible value (1024 - maximum length of
headers) before sending.




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