If you check your /var/log/messages file you can see lot of messages with -Mark- these are useless.You can disable them with the following procedure.
Edit /etc/defaults/syslogd file
#vi /etc/defaults/syslogd
Change the SYSLOGD option to the following
SYSLOGD=”-m 0″
Save and exit the file
Restart syslogd using the following comamnd
#invoke-rc.d sysklogd restart
Actually, the MARK messages are not useless. They let you know that syslogd is still working if a period of time (by default 20 minutes) passes without anything else being logged.
Yep, they’re there for a reason. I think they’re helpful for security auditing (validating of logs) as well as for confirmation that syslog is working, as Randall said.
Perhaps useful in some rare situations, such as a central syslog server, but for most implementations there is no requirement to ‘prove’ that syslog is working, so all it does is create logs full of nothing but that MARK entry. Not useful.
/etc/defaults ? Not /etc/default ?