Chown /var/spool/collector-sidecar/nxlog fails: no such file

Graylog Central (peer support)
1

Hi, all,

Trying to follow the guide to install a Graylog Sidecar, I wind up getting stuck on the step to “unconfigure the default system service” for NXlog, specifically:

$ sudo chown -R nxlog.nxlog /var/spool/collector-sidecar/nxlog
chown: cannot access ‘/var/spool/collector-sidecar/nxlog’: No such file or directory

The collector-sidecar keyword (i.e. not graylog-sidecar as it seems to be properly called as of the new, baked-in version) makes me wonder if this is a leftover from the previous versions of the guide and so if it is still necessary to chown -R nxlog.nxlog some .../nxlog file or directory, only the updated path isn’t in the new guide?

Cheers,
Oscar

(It seems like this might be a necessary step, as it is one of the steps meant to take nxlogout of the control of the system - my collector just failed, saying it “can’t restart since another instance is already running”.)

2

I’ve gotten it up and running again, after making sure that the service is started using systemctl start graylog-sidecar and not graylog-sidecar -service start, and it now seems like it’s working.

The /var/spool/collector-sidecar/nxlog directory appears to have contained the configcache.dat file, which according to the NXLog reference manual should be located in the /var/spool/nxlog directory (which I think was “owned” by nxlog.nxlog from start).

Maybe the main issue for me was starting the service in a faulty way, causing it to not be recognized by the sidecar. I have opened a GitHub issue to fix the corresponding docs and remove the $ sudo chown -R nxlog.nxlog /var/spool/collector-sidecar/nxlog step to avoid future confusion for newcomers.