Topic: Announcements

I have just released rsyslog 1.0.0, the first (official) stable version of rsyslog. Feature-wise it is no difference to 0.9.8, it just has some minor doc changes plus a very little bug fix in the usage note.

From the release point of view, however, this release is a very important achivement. It provides a solid basis for those interested in running a stable release. The 1.0.0 codebase has been run for several weeks now without any error reports. It has also been reviewed, and all issues been ironed out. 1.0.0 creates the stable branch.

Please note that the stable branch will primarily receive fixes. The unstable branch (to be created soon) will have all the new cool features.

If you run any version of rsyslog, I recommend moving to 1.0.0.

I hope this release is helpful.

Rainer Gerhards

I am glad to announce that I have just released rsyslog 0.9.6. This release is focussed on streamlining towards the first final 1.0 release. The documentation has been greatly enhanced and changed to html format. It now includes an installation howto. Also, samples of system startup scripts have been added, hopefully facilitating deployment.

Visit the rsyslog status page for download and link to the change log:

http://www.rsyslog.com/Documentation-/status.html.phtml

There is one important change for existing rsyslogd users: the syntax of the -r option has been changed. It now accepts the port that rsyslogd should listen to. That, however, breaks existing scripts. They must be changed to use "-r 0", which mimics the previous behaviour. I am sorry for this inconsistency, but I thought it is better to keep the command line options consistent - and at the current time changing that interface is hopefully not such a big issue. If we'd do it much later, it might have been impossible. The new syntax also provides ample opportunity for future enhancement, which then can be kept consistent with the -t tcp listener command line option.

The next steps for rsyslog will be to look at the packaging and eventually some further minor clean-ups. I would also appreciate any feedback from practical use, especially if you should run a high-volume system. I now traget the 1.0 release for early September.

There is no need to upgrade to 0.9.6 if you are happy with what you currently run.

I hope the new release is helpful.

Rainer Gerhards

I have written a new tutorial on how to store syslog messages in MySQL. The paper discusses the concepts, describes the actual steps necessary and talks about common pitfalls.

The paper is available in the documentation section, under the title of writing syslog messages to MySQL.

Rsyslog 0.9.5 supports multiple rsyslogd instances on a single machine. This can be useful for special, security-enhanced configurations. Release 0.9.5 also contains improved error message handling during startup and some bug fixes. If you are happy with version 0.9.4, there is no important reason to upgrade to this release.

For full details, see the rsyslog 0.9.5 change log.

Now, the tcp sender is implemented, allowing rsyslog to be used inside all parts of the relay chain. Please note that tcp/syslog allows to encrypt syslog traffic quite easily. Release 0.9.4 is a major step toward a stable 1.0 release of rsyslog. There are some other minor changes in rsyslog, mostly formatting changes in internally-generated messages.

Hi all, I have just written a tutorial on encrypting syslog traffic. This is to be released as part of the 1.0 release of rsyslog. I would deeply appreciate if some of you could have a look at it and provide me some feedback. My intention is to make encrypted syslog much more popular than it is nowadays. Besides a syslogd capable of doing it easy, good documentation is needed. The question is where I have arrrive - and what can be improved. I also intend to ship the configuration files as part of the rsyslogd package. Please follow the link to the syslog encryption tutorial.

this is primarily a bug fixing release! It fixes a nasty bug where the TIMESTAMP was not properly decoded (just in some months). It also adds the capability to specify the destination port when forwarding messages to remote host. Lastly, a very experimental TCP sender is now included. However, the TCP sender can not yet be used in production, as it causes rsyslogd to hang during certain events, e.g. when connecting to the receiver. As the timestamp bug is a really bad one, all users are advised to upgrade to this version (but not yet use the TCP sender feature).

This is a big step forward for rsyslog. Now, it supports reliable message delivery via TCP. Our implementation is compatible with leading tools and devices like syslog-ng, Cisco PIX and MonitorWare under Windows. Note, however, the 0.9.2 release only supports receiving via TCP. Forwarding is not yet supported. So in a relay chain, rsyslog must be the last daemon to receive the message. Syslog/tcp support is activated via a simple command line switch without any need for complex configuration file changes!

some tweaks in version 0.9.1 have been made so that it now compiles without source changes under FreeBSD. Also, the large file code had a potential bug, which has been fixed. Also some other minor clean-ups.

rsyslog version 0.9.0 now supports log files larger than 2gb (where supported by OS & file system) and the ability to specify the maximum size that a log file is allowed to grow. If it grows larger, a rotation script (or something similiar) can automatically be called from within rsyslog.