Configuring and Managing MPE/iX Internet Services (MPE/iX 6.5)

Appendix C 205
BIND 8.1 Enhanced Features
BIND 8 Highlights
Definition and Usage
The logging statement configures a wide variety of logging options for
the nameserver. Its channel phrase associates output methods, format
options and severity levels with a name that can then be used with the
category phrase to select how various classes of messages are logged.
Only one logging statement is used to define as many channels and
categories as are wanted. If there are multiple logging statements in a
configuration, the first defined determines the logging, and warnings
are issued for the others. If there is no logging statement, the logging
configuration will be:
logging {
category default { default_syslog; default_debug; };
category panic { default_syslog; default_stderr; };
category packet { default_debug; };
category eventlib { default_debug; };
};
The Channel Phrase
All log output goes to one or more “channels”; make as many of them as
you want.
Every channel definition must include a clause that says whether
messages selected for the channel go to a file, to a particular syslog
facility, or are discarded. It can optionally also limit the message
severity level that will be accepted by the channel (default is “info”),
and whether to include a named generated time stamp, the category
name and/or severity level (default is not to include any).
The word null as the destination option for the channel will cause all
messages sent to it to be discarded; other options for the channel are
meaningless.
The file clause can include limitations both on how large the file is
allowed to become, and how many versions of the file will be saved each
time the file is opened.
The size option for files is simply a hard ceiling on log growth. If the file
ever exceeds the size, then named will just not write anything more to it
until the file is reopened; exceeding the size does not automatically
trigger a reopen. The default behavior is to not limit the size of the file.
If you use the version logfile option, then named will retain many
backup versions of the file by renaming them when opening. For
example, if you choose to keep 3 old versions of the file “lamers.log”
then just before it is opened lamers.log.1 is renamed to lames.log.2,
lamers.log.0 is renamed to lamers.log.1, and lamers.log is
renamed to lamers.log.0. No rolled versions are kept by default. The
unlimited keyword is synonymous with 99 in current BIND releases.
The argument for the syslog clause is a syslog facility described earlier