[otterley]

If you need guaranteed log delivery, I wouldn't do that. Unread logs won't survive a power failure or system crash.

[res0nat0r]

Aren't you also not ensuring delivery when using remote syslogging in default mode? I believe this is all logged via UDP, so if the network or syslog host is overloaded your syslog messages will be silently dropped.

[otterley]

In default mode, sure. But modern syslog daemons also support TCP transports. And both rsyslog and syslog-ng have commercial versions that buffer logs to disk (though double-buffering isn't necessary here where the source is a log file already on disk).

[bashtoni]

That's correct. rsyslog also supports TCP though.

[teraflop]

Writing to /var/log doesn't get you guaranteed delivery either, unless you're calling fsync() after every write.