Major CentOS7 RPM changes
We made some major changes to the way the RPMs for CentOS7/RHEL7 are built. We have adapted the spec file definitions of the base repo to build our own RPMs after we detected some trouble with the last released version. That means, that some things will also change, so our RPMs are more like the official ones.
Stock CentOS 7 8.24.0 package to 8.32.0-1 package upgrade
The upgrade completes and the same functionality present before is present here. Because the syntax was obsolete legacy format before and the format is obsolete legacy format now the /etc/rsyslog.d/listen.conf file passes validation checks (rsyslogd -N6) without issue.
That said, the /etc/rsyslog.d/listen.conf file doesn’t really do anything because the /etc/rsyslog.conffile disables local logging and the /usr/lib/systemd/system/rsyslog.repo unit file doesn’t enable socket activation (basically the symlink from /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/rsyslog.service wasn’t created and systemd doesn’t create the /run/systemd/journal/syslog socket for rsyslog to read from).
Not a problem here because the conf file was stock before and is still stock (now upstream Adiscon copy), so imjournal is used to pull log messages (API?) instead of via a socket.
Adiscon repo 8.31.0-4 stable package (with unmodified Adiscon RPM config) to 8.32.0-1 package upgrade
After installing the 8.31.0-4 package (the last one), systemctl disable rsyslog; systemctl enable rsyslog and that workaround seemed to allow that version to function as expected (restart, start, stop). A now performed upgrade to the new package and rebooted. Prior to that, attempting to run systemctl status rsyslogwarned me that I should run systemctl daemon-reload (or restart) to sort things out.
After a restart, all stock settings appeared to function normally. The upgrade (yum install rsyslog) pulled in the needed libfastjson package version without my explicitly specifying to install that package. The /etc/rsyslog.conf file included in the previous stable version was replaced, but this was to be expected because I did not modify the previous conf file (thus the checksums match).
Adiscon repo 8.31.0-4 with custom config to 8.32.0-1 package upgrade
In short, the symlink from /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/rsyslog.service wasn’t created and systemd doesn’t create the /run/systemd/journal/syslog socket for rsyslog to read from. In a setup where imuxsock is used, not imjournal this means that rsyslog was not able to read from the socket. To restore this functionality, you have to create a drop-in to restore the socket activation.
Once you did that and either rebooted or ran systemctl daemon-reload, the /run/systemd/journal/syslogsocket was restored.
Addendum
Unmodified configurations should continue to work as before, so there is that.
Users of rsyslog who are using the Adiscon RPMs for a while now, may notice a change in the available module packages because the modules are now incorporated in the basic rsyslog package as in the RPM from the base repo. The affected module packages are (now no longer needed):
rsyslog-mmanon
rsyslog-mmutf8fix
rsyslog-mail
rsyslog-pmaixforwardedfrom
Installing rsyslog from RPM
We want to describe here, how to install rsyslog from the RPM repository on RHEL/CentOS 5 and 6. Currently, we have RPMs available for the most recent versions of rsyslog.
To use the repository, please follow these steps.
1. Obtain the .repo file
To be able to use the RPM repository, you need a .repo file. Using your webbrowser, go to http://rpms.adiscon.com. Here, either download the rsyslogall.repo file or go to the subfolder for the desired version (e.g. v7-stable) and download the rsyslog.repo file from there.
2. Placing the file in the correct location
You now need to place the downloaded file in the correct folder. The .repo file must be placed in
/etc/yum.repos.d/
3. Finding updates
You should now do a “yum update”. The update for rsyslog will be detected automatically. Note, that the file rsyslogall.repo contains the repository configuration for each available branch, whereas the rsyslog.repo only provides repository configuration for the selected branch.
A note on signed RPM’s
On RHEL/CentOS 5 it is not possible to check for signed RPM’s. This is due to a bug in the RPM/YUM subsystem. So, Please DO NOT USE gpgcheck=1! If you however couldn’t resist trying it, and your system stucks with “Header V3 RSA/SHA1 signature: BAD, key ID e00b8985″, follow these steps:
- Set gpgcheck in your rsyslog.repo file back to 0.
- Run this command to remove the gpg key from your system: rpm –erase gpg-pubkey-e00b8985-512dde96
Install locations for rsyslog
Not everyone uses the same linux distributions. If Linux at all. And some distributions store files different than others. When building a test environment, we stumbled upon the problem, that if we tried the usual know method
./configure --libdir=/lib --sbindir=/sbin
rsyslog won’t work. Even if there is already rsyslog installed, but we want to use a different version, we will be helpless. Therefore we want to collect a list of different distributions and the different installation paths.
All paths are for 32-Bit operating systems!
Fedora
libdir=/lib sbindir=/sbin
Ubuntu
libdir=/lib sbindir=/usr/sbin
CentOS
libdir=/lib sbindir=/sbin
Debian
libdir=/lib sbindir=/usr/sbin
If you know of other distributions and the install directories, please send us a notification via the mailing list, so we can add it here.