No syslog on virtual machines and error on rsyslog install

[luison]

Hi.
After some headaches we managed to migrate 2 physical servers (Ubuntu 9.10) to OpenVZ containers under PVE. We had some issues with terminals and others and had to mix some /dev with clean templates installations for it to work.

We've now realized that rsyslog (which comes now with Ubuntu 9.10) is not running and fails to start (and we don't have any logs to check obviouslly). We've tried reinstalling and installation fails when it tries to configure with dpkg :

start: Unknown job: rsyslog
invoke-rc.d: initscript rsyslog, action "restart" failed.
dpkg: error processing rsyslog (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 rsyslog

We then thought if had to do with out P2V migration so we installed a clean template from OpenVZ wiki for Ubuntu 9.10 to check what we might be missing. This surprisingly comes with sysklogd instead. So back top our VM we removed rsyslog and tried to install sysklogd:

Unpacking sysklogd (from .../sysklogd_1.5-5ubuntu4_amd64.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package klogd.
Unpacking klogd (from .../klogd_1.5-5ubuntu4_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up sysklogd (1.5-5ubuntu4) ...
 * Starting system log daemon...                                                                              [ OK ]

Setting up klogd (1.5-5ubuntu4) ...
 * Starting kernel log daemon...                                                                              [fail]

Out of curiosity back to our clean Ubuntu 9.10 VM and "/etc/init.d/klogd restart" produces the same error!!!

Anyone had any similar issues?

Are any specific /dev required on the VM for syslog to work?

And also... any central syslog OVZ template of KVM machine worth pointing at?

Many thanks.