Applies to: klogd 1.4.1-16ubuntu6 (hoary) and probably 1.4.1-16ubuntu4 and ...ubuntu5 as well. When using -P (selecting input source for klogd) in conjunction with -c (changing default log level for console messages), the -c option seems to be ignored by klogd. I added -c 3 to the standard option list in the init script and still got as much output to the console as before. The only work around I could find is to run klogd as root (without -P) as before. Obviously I'd rather like to run klogd without root priviliges but as a console user it's really annoying to get a bulk of messages each time you plug in another usb device are mount a file system. Related to this I would also like to suggest to add a /etc/default/klogd file where the user would be able to specify an options string to be passed to klogd. This file wouldn't be silently overwritten during upgrades. Finally I have to point out that the -P option isn't documented in the man page and doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere except from the changelog.
It seems as if the call to ksyslog during initialisation (in function
GetKernelLogSrc) requires root privileges in order to change the
console log level. One solution would be to start klogd as root and
let it drop root privileges after initialisation if an appropriate
command line option has been given. This is not a clean solution,
however, since klogd would be unable to restore the original setting
during termination. An alternative would be to use a small tool just
for making these calls to ksyslog and let the klogd startup script
take care of console log level changes. This doesn't seem very clean
to me either because the original settings would only be restored if
klogd was terminated by the klogd init script.