[COLOR="Red"]Q: What's the problem with syslog and dnsmasq?[/COLOR]
A: In almost all cases: none. If you have the normal arrangement with
local daemons logging to a local syslog, which then writes to disk,
then there's never a problem. If you use network logging, then
there's a potential problem with deadlock: the syslog daemon will
do DNS lookups so that it can log the source of log messages,
these lookups will (depending on exact configuration) go through
dnsmasq, which also sends log messages. With bad timing, you can
arrive at a situation where syslog is waiting for dnsmasq, and
dnsmasq is waiting for syslog; they will both wait forever. This
problem is fixed from dnsmasq-2.39, which introduces asynchronous
logging: dnsmasq no longer waits for syslog and the deadlock is
broken. There is a remaining problem in 2.39, where "log-queries"
is in use. In this case most DNS queries generate two log lines, if
these go to a syslog which is doing a DNS lookup for each log line,
then those queries will in turn generate two more log lines, and a
chain reaction runaway will occur. To avoid this, use syslog-ng
and turn on syslog-ng's dns-cache function.