Answer

Most messages printed by VMware Smart Assurance code use the exception logging mechanism with something like CI_ExException(...).log(), or SM_System logXXX() calls from ASL. The exception logging mechanism can send messages to one of two receivers, which could be the:

• Log file

• System error logger, which is the syslog mechanism on UNIX systems

  The second mechanism has the potential to cause problems. On UNIX systems, the syslog files are typically on small partitions, for example, /var/tmp. There have been cases where attempts to start VI failed because it uses /var/tmp for temporary files, and /var/tmp is filled with a huge log of messages from the VMware Smart Assurance server. Deleting the log file would temporarily solve the problem, but the system logger re-creates it and it will promptly start growing again. The exception logging mechanism is controlled by the severity level assigned to the message being logged. In the order from most to least severe, a message can have one of the following severity levels:

  Fatal, Error, Warning, Notice, Informational or Debug

  You can individually assign, to each of the two receivers, the minimum severity level for messages to be sent to that receiver. By default, the log file receives messages of severity Warning or above, and the system error logger receives messages of severity Error or above. Two standard options available with all VMware Smart Assurance main programs control these two levels:

• --errlevel: controls the minimum level for writing to the log file

• --loglevel: controls the minimum level for sending to the system logging facility

  If you use --help, you will see that there you can specify any of the listed severity levels as a value for either of these options, as well as a couple of additional levels that make sense to syslog, but which are synonyms for Fatal for the VMware Smart Assurance code. In addition, you can specify None to completely disable a particular receiver.

  If it is inconvenient to change your startup scripts, you can use the SM_MAIN_OPTIONS environment variable. Any standard option that appears in this variable becomes the default. You can override these default values on the command line. Thus, after setting:

• SM_MAIN_OPTIONS=--loglevel=None

• export SM_MAIN_OPTIONS

  any VMware Smart Assurance program you start will, by default will not send anything to the system error logging facility. To avoid having to actually look at the system log files always, you can set this in your .profile.