Logging and guix-home

Logging and guix-home

[Fredrik Salomonsson]

Hi Guix,

I got a question how to setup logging for daemons that are controlled by
shepherd that guix home creates. First some background info.

I have been slowly migrating my dotfiles from a GNU stow setup to guix
home. I'm currently using guix on a foreign distro that uses systemd.
Where systemd was controlling my user level daemons, e.g. ssh-agent.

But now that I use guix home, I have migrated them to shepherd. With
that I lost the handy logging you get from systemd. To mitigate that for
shepherd I'm right now using the #:log-file parameter, as suggested in
this thread [1], to send the output to a file.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2019-04/msg00178.html

Here's how I've setup the ssh-agent

--8<----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(define-public services
  (list
   (simple-service 'plt-ssh-environment
                   home-environment-variables-service-type
                   `(("SSH_AUTH_SOCK" . "${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/ssh-agent.socket")))
   (simple-service 'plt-ssh-agent
                   home-shepherd-service-type
                   `(
                     ,(shepherd-service
                       (provision '(ssh-agent))
                       (documentation "Run and control ssh key agent.")
                       (start #~(make-forkexec-constructor
                                 `("ssh-agent" "-D" "-a"
                                   ,(format #f "~a/ssh-agent.socket" (getenv "XDG_RUNTIME_DIR")))
                                 #:log-file (format #f "~a/ssh-agent.log" (getenv "XDG_LOG_HOME"))))
                       (stop #~(make-kill-destructor)))
                     ))))
---------------------------------------------------------------------------->8--

I do want some better logging, than just dumping to a file, as otherwise
I'll eventual run out of disk space. I have been pretty spoiled with
systemd on that part, and I have very little experience with syslog.
Given that I'm on a foreign distro, I cannot use the syslog-service (as
far as I know). Does anyone have a good idea on how to set this it up?

For example if I setup syslog and put "/dev/log" in the #:log-file
parameter, will it work? 

Or is syslog the wrong thing for user daemon logging? and instead I
should look for something else?

Thanks

-- 
s/Fred[re]+i[ck]+/Fredrik/g

Re: Logging and guix-home

[Hartmut Goebel]

Am 13.11.21 um 02:45 schrieb Fredrik Salomonsson:
> But now that I use guix home, I have migrated them to shepherd. With
> that I lost the handy logging you get from systemd. To mitigate that for
> shepherd I'm right now using the #:log-file parameter, as suggested in
> this thread [1], to send the output to a file.

Does setting #:log:file to /dev/stdout work for you? ((Just an idea, 
I've not tested it)

-- 
+++hartmut

| Hartmut Goebel            |                       |
| hartmut@goebel-consult.de | www.goebel-consult.de |

Re: Logging and guix-home

[Fredrik Salomonsson]

Hi,

Sorry for the radio silence, it's been a busy week.

Hartmut Goebel <hartmut@goebel-consult.de> writes:

> Does setting #:log:file to /dev/stdout work for you? ((Just an idea, 
> I've not tested it)

Yes, it has the same behavior as not using #:log:file. And that is to
output everything to the first tty I log into. Which is the behavior I
would like to avoid, it makes the logging ephemeral and also hard to
read. As I have it to automatically spawn sway if I login on tty1.

Right now logging to a file kind of works, as I don't have many user
daemons running (only ssh-agent). And ssh-agent does not output that
much. One downside I don't have any timestamps in the log file or
anything like that. 

Gnupg was hard to convert as my foreign distro needs it and it ships
with systemd socket files which are enable by default. And I'm too lazy
to disable those in case I break something on my foreign distro.

So I've put the logging on the backburner. And I'll revisit it once I
have moved all my dotfiles over to guix home.

-- 
s/Fred[re]+i[ck]+/Fredrik/g