Why is syslog not logging where I tell it to log?
I can confirm the following worked on my Mac running 10.6.7:

I added the following line to /etc/syslog.conf (where &lt;tab&gt; is a tab character):

*.debug&lt;tab&gt;/var/log/messages


I HUP'd the syslogd process using sudo kill -HUP &lt;syslogd pid&gt;.

And tested it with logger -p debug test_msg and syslog -s hello.

syslog created /var/log/messages on the fly as I used the logger and syslog commands.

The man page for syslog.conf(5) specifies the use of tabs between the fields.  However, I tried using a single space instead and that worked as well.  Based on the man pages for syslog and syslogd, /etc/syslog.conf appears to be the only configuration file you need to worry about.