freebsd security - Jun 2003 - Serial Ports and syslogd

Hello, 
It's a bit off topic, but I'm hoping someone has seen this before.
I'm running a couple of headless boxes, one is 4.7 release, the other is 4.8
release. Both have the same issue with newsyslog when I've got the serial
port enabled for console management. (-h in boot.conf and a getty running on
cuaa0 after the boot process)
Logrotate tries to send an HUP to syslogd, but it's not working properly. I
get rotated logs, but they stay empty. If I "nuke" syslogd, and try to
restart it, it eventually dies with "waiting for child" messages and
my sendmail hangs. Syslogd comes back alive after reboot. I'm just logging
locally with -s -s for flags to syslogd.
So, I find a few discussions saying fsync() may be the reason, and try swaping
syslogd with this line removed in syslogd.c (without being very good at C) and
knowing full well, I'll loose the most important, last few lines of logs
when my machine dies. Still no help.
/*flags = ISKERNEL | SYNC_FILE | ADDDATE;*/ 
Anybody using serial without any logging problems?  Or is there a better way to
kill syslogd and restart it?

Thanks so much,  that got it.

Subject: Re: Serial Ports and syslogd



Your syslogd is trying to log to the console, over the serial line, and 
is getting
stuck waiting for output to flush there.  The easiest fix is to edit 
/etc/syslog.conf,
and remove the line that is sending output to /dev/console.  Once you 
do that,
and restart everything, you won't see your problem again.