[CentOS] CentOS-6 Logwatch 7.3.6 behaviour

Fri Sep 18 16:53:24 UTC 2015
James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>

After some experimenting I have observed that overriding settings from
/usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf in
/etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf does not produce consistent results.


For example, if I replace the default detail configuration in
etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf with:

Detail = High

It does indeed change the level of detail from the default Low set in
/usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf.

However, if I comment out the line:

#Service = "-zz-sys"         # Prevents execution of zz-sys service

in the overridden file then the fact that this line remains in the
default.conf version means that the sservice cannot be enabled to run
by default without editing
/usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf.  Of course doing that
means that any update clobbers the local changes.

I am not sure if this a bug or a design feature but it seems to me
that on should be able to override all of the default settings for
services.

The only way around this seems to be to specify '--service All' on the
command line.  But then the service entries in logwatch.conf seem to
be ignored entirely so that one must also specify the service
exclusions on the command line.

I also ran across a rather bizarre 'feature' with the 'DisplayOrder'
setting.  Evidently, if one gives the same DisplayOrder value to two
or more services (say zz-sys which has DisplayOrder = 0.4 and
zz-runtime which uses the default value of 0.5 otherwise) then only
the last service (ordered alphabetically) is reported.  No errors are
logged or conflict notices are given either.  The other service
reports just 'disappear'.  However, one can explicitly assign multiple
services a DisplayOrder value of 0.5 and all are reported nonetheless,
in alphabetic order, along with the other services which simply take
the implicit default value.

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