While debugging an issue with OpenLDAP, I noticed that journalctl
colors its output. From the man page:
When outputting to a tty, lines are colored according to priority: lines of level ERROR and higher are colored red; lines of level NOTICE and higher are highlighted; lines of level DEBUG are colored lighter grey; other lines are displayed normally.
While this is nice for higher priority levels such as ERROR, it is not
useful for messages with DEBUG priority. Those appear in light grey
which makes them hard to read on terminal themes with a light
background.
The easiest way is to set the environment variable SYSTEMD_COLORS
which overrides automatic coloring. To follow the OpenLDAP debug log:
$ sudo SYSTEMD_COLORS=false journalctl -u slapd -f