Assumed Standard rsyslog.conf

When I initially started to write this book, I provided only excerpts of rsyslog.conf that showed which lines you had to add. Quickly, I received feedback that this is inadequate to make the recipies easy to use – because everyone still needed to guess where to place the excerpts. Or, even worse, place them at the wrong spots, not knowing that sequence of statements is important in rsyslog.conf.

To solve this issue, I now use a “standard” syslog config, just like can be found on many systems. Your’s may not be exactly the same, but I guess the standard config helps you find where the configuration samples need to go into. As a reference point, this is the “standard” config that all samples build on:

# Log anything (except mail) of level info or higher.
# Don't log private authentication messages!
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none      /var/log/messages
# The authpriv file has restricted access.
authpriv.*                                    /var/log/secure
# Log all the mail messages in one place.
mail.*                                        /var/log/maillog
# Log cron stuff
cron.*                                        /var/log/cron
# Everybody gets emergency messages
*.emerg                                       *
# Save news errors of level crit and higher in a special file.
uucp,news.crit                                /var/log/spooler
# Save boot messages also to boot.log
local7.*                                      /var/log/boot.log

I was hesitant at first to use a real-life sample – repeating it in any recipe requires much space. However, I have convinced myself that this space is well spent, facilitating the adoption of the samples. Only occasionally, when I give some counter-examples, I spare myself from reproducing the full standard rsyslog.conf, hoping that the context makes clear what is meant.

In each recipe, a full rsyslog.conf, based on above example, is specified. The recipe-specific alterations to the config file are given in a different typeface, so that they can be easily identified.

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