Happy to report (on July 5, 2012) that your suggestion fixes the problem for me (on perl 5.10 on Cygwin 1.7.15 on Windows 7): installing Sys::Syslog causes the Net::Daemon to stop complaining about the missing /dev/log and it, too, installs successfully. It might help to make Net::Daemon's installer suggest installation of Sys::Syslog.