I'd love to enter a feature request, but until discord believes I've earned enough cool points, I'll put this here.
Basically, I'd like to request a feature in pi-hole that allows for the pihole.log file to be a named pipe. As I mention in the article this change enables sending syslog to a remote server for collection, on device troubleshooting as the logs can still be viewed from the pipe, and less wear on the storage device.
I have a working example in the article. I just recently upgraded to 5.2.2 and I'll document the changes required to maintain the configuration.
As clearly noted in that file you shouldn't be editing that file.
###############################################################################
# FILE AUTOMATICALLY POPULATED BY PI-HOLE INSTALL/UPDATE PROCEDURE. #
# ANY CHANGES MADE TO THIS FILE AFTER INSTALL WILL BE LOST ON THE NEXT UPDATE #
# #
# IF YOU WISH TO CHANGE THE UPSTREAM SERVERS, CHANGE THEM IN: #
# /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf #
# #
# ANY OTHER CHANGES SHOULD BE MADE IN A SEPARATE CONFIG FILE #
# WITHIN /etc/dnsmasq.d/yourname.conf #
###############################################################################
Have you considered using a symlink instead?
Note: the amount of wear and tear on an SD card from the dnsmasq log is trivial.
maybe it's broken, though it's still likely I've fat fingered something. Reading this post led me to believe that I could set this value in a subsequent file, but it seems that pihole doesn't like it if it sees it twice?
With regard to your suggestion to "use a symlink" can you provide a bit more details?
Yep, totally understand symlinks, my question was, how would that solve my problem? The issue that I see is that if I set local5 as a facility for syslog (accepting the violation previously mentioned) then logging goes to syslog and control of the resulting file is removed from the control of pi-hole. Any rotating, pruning, truncated, could conflict with other system operations like logrotate.