"SYSLOG"

[jwalker@crl.dec.com]

In one of the SLUG sessions, someone mentioned using a
facility they referred to as "SYSLOG" for finding out about
server errors.  Since it was supposed to be a session for
heavy hackers, I figured that everyone except me knew about
it and decided to look it up in the documentation when I got
home.  Silly me.  I don't see anything documented that
sounds like what people were talking about.  Could you
please give me some hints as to whether
whatever-this-is-if-it-exists would help with the following
problem.

I have a program that runs in the background and does file
I/O occasionally.  If it runs into problems doing file I/O,
I don't want it to bother the user, just try again later.
But I would also like a way to find out about such problems
in case they are due to a bug rather than to some
availability problem.  The users are at a different site so
I would most like to get mail about any difficulties.  Do I
have to roll my own or is there something that people have
discovered?

Thanks.
Jan Walker