GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Messages File

Every 2o minutes the syslogd daemon writes a message to /var/log/messages simply to note that the machine is still up:

  -- MARK --

The frequency is controlled by the -m option of the syslogd and can be set to, for example, every 60 minutes rather than the default 20 minutes, with the following setting in /etc/init.d/sysklogd:

  SYSLOGD="-m 60"