Before moving away from syslog, I'd like to note a couple of advanced topics for ambitious readers. These tips may save you some grief when trying to understand syslog-related topics.

First, the syslog daemon is actually part of the sysklogd package, which contains a second daemon called klogd. It's klogd's job to receive information and error messages from the kernel, and pass them on to syslogd for categorization and logging. The messages received by klogd are exactly the same as those you can retrieve using the dmesg command. The difference is that dmesg prints the current contents of a ring buffer in the kernel, whereas klogd is passing the messages to syslogd so that they won't be lost when the ring wraps around.