Author Biography
Rich Mogull has been working in the security world for 17 or so years, and breaking computers (usually by accident) even longer. After about 10 years in physical security (mostly running large events/concerts), he made the mistake of getting drunk in Silicon Valley and telling someone he "worked in security." Next morning he woke up with a job as an IT security consultant. That's not totally true, but it's far more amusing than his full biography. He currently works as an independent security consultant and writer through Securosis.com and previously spent seven years as an analyst with Gartner. Rich has also worked as a paramedic, done stints as a firefighter and with Rocky Mountain Rescue, and recently retired from ski patrol when he moved to sunny Arizona. He still dabbles in disaster medicine, when nature cooperates.
Syslogd Overwhelming Your Computer?
If your Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) system is unexpectedly sluggish, logging might be the culprit. Run Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/ folder), and click the CPU column twice to get it to show most to least activity. If syslogd is at the top of the list, there's a fix. Syslogd tracks informational messages produced by software and writes them to the asl.db, a file in your Unix /var/log/ directory. It's a known problem that syslogd can run amok. There's a fix: deleting the asl.db file.
Launch Terminal (from the same Utilities folder), and enter these commands exactly as written, entering your administrative password when prompted:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Your system should settle down to normal. For more information, follow the link.
Written by
Glenn Fleishman
Articles by Rich Mogull
Security Editor
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