[Chapter 26] 26.5 Pitfalls
Author: Bryan Costales & Eric Allman
Date: 1999-01-06T19:41:27Z

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| Chapter 26 Logging and Statistics |

## 26.5 Pitfalls

- The syslog(3) library uses datagram sockets for passing information to other hosts. As a consequence, there is no guarantee that all logged information will be received by those other hosts.

- When using m4, exercise care to avoid using m4 keywords in unexpected places. For example, attempting to notify a user named `dnl` in the syslog.conf file causes that name and all the text following on the same line to be lost.

- Prior to V8, sendmail used no record or file locking with the `StatusFile` (`S`) option's statistics file. As a consequence, it was not guaranteed to contain 100 percent accurate information. As another consequence, statistics files should never be shared among multiple hosts using remote file systems.

- Care should be exercised in using the `-X` switch as root. No check is made to ensure that the transaction logging file makes sense. It is possible to make a typo and accidently append transaction data to the wrong file or device.

26.4 Log Transactions with -X |  | IV. Reference