Stupid Debian syslog.conf

Debian. I love the Debian. But the logs in Debian annoy me.

1. You can't read 'em unless you're part of the adm group, or root. Not right.
2. Iptables denied packets get logged to kernel.log, messages.log and syslog.
3. What, precisely, is the difference between kernel.log and syslog? Between daemon.log and debug.log? Why is exim4/mainlog not symlinked to mail.log?
4. There's the annoying habit of printing far too much to the console. My time and my screen's real estate are precious -- doubly so when I'm in single-user mode (another rant) trying to fix something. The last thing I want is to have precious, precious vi sessions drowned out with kernel: IN=eth2 SRC=24.82.14.99 LEN=64 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=45 ID=40654 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=2678 DPT=445 WINDOW=53760 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0. Fuck that noise!

FreeBSD, by contrast, has it fucking down. There's messages.log for everything you're likely to need as a normal user -- except mail messages, which are conveniently located at mail.log. For the sysadmin, you've got security.log (firewall stuff), auth.log (login stuff) and all.log (everything). It's simple, easy to understand and you can bloody well ready what you need to without becoming root. Sigh.

In other news, thanks to Mr. Dickens I came across Belanix today, a live OpenSolaris CD. I'm currently scrounging around for a spare machine to boot from, as QEMU seems to confuse it.