openvpn3-service-log(8)

💖 openvpn3-service-log — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so you wanna know about openvpn3-service-log? that's the internal log service for OpenVPN 3 Linux, and she's lowkey the gossip hub of the whole system — every other service comes to her to spill their log events. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

openvpn3-service-log [OPTIONS]
openvpn3-service-log -h | --help

that's it. that's the vibe. she takes options and she takes --help, and she takes them seriously. 💅

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so this program can run in two modes, and which one you get changes literally everything about how she behaves:

• as a stand-alone program with no services enabled
• as a D-Bus service

by default, openvpn3-service-log gets started automatically as a D-Bus service whenever any of the OpenVPN 3 Linux service backends wants to send log events. the auto-start is handled by the dbus-daemon via the net.openvpn.v3.log.service configuration file. no cap, she just appears. main character energy fr.

when you run her as a stand-alone program, she's limited in what kind of log events she'll receive. the other backend services need to use the --signal-broadcast option for this program to pick up log events as they occur. and here's the tea 🍵: the drawback of this approach is that everyone on the system may listen to the various log signals happening. so this operational mode is therefore more useful when you're debugging the various OpenVPN 3 Linux services, or when it's believed to be an issue with the related D-Bus policies.

if you run her as a D-Bus service, though? each of the various backend services will attach themselves to this log service before starting to send log events. this has a higher security profile and restricts log event access to only this program. she's exclusive like that. 👑

the default behaviour is to print log events to the terminal, unless otherwise configured via options provided during the start-up. simple. iconic. periodt.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

okay bestie, here's the full menu. no skipping, we're doing all of them.

• -h, --help — prints usage and help details to the terminal. your girl is helpful ✨
• --version — prints the version of the program and exists. (yes, that's what the manpage says, and yes we are keeping it exactly like that, no notes 💀)
• --timestamp — this enables printing timestamps to the log output. mostly useful when you're sending log data to a file or the terminal. when you're using other system log services (such as syslog), timestamps are often added by those log services instead — so she doesn't double up.
• --colour — when logging to terminal or file, this adds ANSI colour escape codes to the log data, to more easily separate various log events from each other. log event colours are grouped by the log level of the log event. rainbow-coded logs, we love to see it 🌈
• --log-level LEVEL — sets the system wide log verbosity for the log events being logged to file or any other log destination openvpn3-service-log is configured to use. valid values are 0 to 6. the higher the value, the more verbose the log events will be. log level 6 will retrieve all debug events.

also, setting this again because she said it twice and we respect that: this sets the system wide log verbosity for log events being logged to file or any other log destination openvpn3-service-log is configured to use. the default is 3. valid values are 0 to 6. higher log levels result in more verbose logs, and log level 6 will contain all debug log events. and get this — this log-level setting can be modified at runtime via openvpn3-admin log-service if running with --service. live tweaking, slay 🔥

• --log-file FILE — this will write all log events to FILE instead of the terminal. bye bye terminal, hello file.
• --journald — this will make all log events be sent to the systemd-journald(8) log service. this approach will add additional meta data to the journal log to each log event. the additional journal fields added are prefixed with O3_. examples of such fields are: O3_LOGTAG, O3_SENDER, O3_INTERFACE, O3_OBJECT_PATH, O3_LOG_GROUP and O3_LOG_CATEGORY.

to view this information, use the --output-fields= option to journalctl(1).

example:

# journalctl --output-fields=O3_LOGTAG,O3_OBJECT_PATH,O3_INTERFACE \
      O3_LOG_GROUP,MESSAGE -o verbose

• --no-logtag-prefix — this option is only effective together with --journald. the default is to prefix each log line (MESSAGE=) with a tag value unique to the sender (see openvpn3-admin log-service --list-subscriptions). with journald logging, this log tag is already preserved as a journal meta filed (O3_LOGTAG). by enabling this option, this log tag prefixing to the log message line will not happen. (yep, the original says "meta filed" — we're keeping it, typos are part of the lore 🫶)
• --syslog — this will make all log events be sent to the generic system logger via the syslog(3) function. old school, still valid.
• --syslog-facility LOG-FACILITY — to be used together with --syslog. the default LOG-FACILITY is LOG_DAEMON. for other valid facilities, see the facility section in syslog(3).
• --service-log-dbus-details — each log event contains some more detailed meta-data of the sender of the log event. this is disabled by default, but when enabled it will add a line on the log destination before the log event itself with this meta-data. this is mostly only useful when debugging and not recommended for normal production. 🙈
• --idle-exit MINUTES — the openvpn3-service-log service will exit automatically if it is being idle for MINUTES minutes. by being idle, it means no other services have attached their log streams to this service. to see how many log subscriptions are attached, see the output of openvpn3 log-service. she logs off when nobody's talking to her 😭
• --state-dir DIRECTORY — when this option is given, it will save the current runtime settings in a file inside this directory. this is used to preserve the log settings across process restarts, for example if the --idle-exit kicks in or the host is rebooted. the contents of this file is not expected to be modified directly but rather use the openvpn3-admin log-service as the configuration tool.

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

openvpn3(1) · openvpn3-admin-log-service(1) · syslog(3)

go read those too, iykyk 💖

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one is from OpenVPN 3 Linux, and yeah — openvpn3-service-log(8) out. go forth and log responsibly ✨🦋🎀