One of the most useful things if you're experience problems when configuring applications is the information that's capture in the log files.

Here's a small list of locations for Red Hat

Startup Log - the "dmesg" command
System Log - /var/log/messages
Service start/stop log - /var/log/boot.log
Security Log - /var/log/secure
Sendmail Log - /var/log/maillog
Apache Access Log - /var/log/httpd/access_log
Apache Error Log - /var/log/httpd/error_log

You can use the "tail" utility to continually tail the log files:

tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/secure

Add more or ask if you want to know more - don't be shy!

-Chris

I find dealing with syslogd configuration very annoying.

A great alternative is syslog-ng, a modern replacement for the syslogd dinosaur. Pretty easy to make it log to remote machines, filter log messages, run scripts when a log message matches an expression, and so on...