disable logging to syslog in Ubuntu 16.04

[bil]

Hi all,

Syncthing is awesome, I love it!

However, I recently discovered that it outputs a log to syslog. I’d like to stop that.

I use the following repository in Ubuntu 16.04 https://apt.syncthing.net/ syncthing stable

Thus the systemd service file looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Syncthing - Open Source Continuous File Synchronization for %I
Documentation=man:syncthing(1)
After=network.target
Wants=syncthing-inotify@.service

[Service]
User=%i
ExecStart=/usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0
Restart=on-failure
SuccessExitStatus=3 4
RestartForceExitStatus=3 4

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I can not use the -logfile command line option, as it can not be used with -no-restart.

I dont care if the logging output goes to a different file or to no file at all. As I understand, it is in the system journal in any case. I just dont wont it in syslog.

Anyone who can help?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

Logging goes via systemd in this setup so you want to figure out how to disable logging or syslog forwarding for a specific program in systemd. I think systemd by default logs to syslog in Ubuntu for compatibility.

[imsodin (Simon)]

In the system systemd config there is DefaultStandardOutput if its value is syslog you can just override that for syncthing by adding these lines to the service section:

StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=journal

However on debian this works different: DefaultStandardOutput is journal but nevertheless systemd sends everything to /run/systemd/journal/syslog where rsyslogd apparently also reads from without any configuration. That’s how I get stuff into both syslog and journal. If that’s the case you can either use filtering rules on the syslog side or set the syncthing service to log to a file, e.g. (systemd will not do any log rotation)

StandardOutput=/var/log/syncthing.log
StandardError=/var/log/syncthing.log