rsyslog 8.18.0 (v8-stable) released
We have released rsyslog 8.18.0.
This is mostly a bug-fixing release. Among the big number of fixes are a few additions to the testbench and some minor enhancements for several modules (like redis, omkafka, imfile) to provide more convenience.
To get a full overview over the changes, please take a look at the Changelog.
ChangeLog:
https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/blob/v8-stable/ChangeLog
Download:
http://www.rsyslog.com/downloads/download-v8-stable/
As always, feedback is appreciated.
Best regards,
Florian Riedl
Changelog for 8.18.0 (v8-stable)
Version 8.18.0 [v8-stable] 2016-04-19
- testbench: When running privdrop tests testbench tries to drop
user to “rsyslog”, “syslog” or “daemon” when running as root and
you don’t explict set RSYSLOG_TESTUSER environment variable.
Make sure the unprivileged testuser can write into tests/ dir! - templates: add option to convert timestamps to UTC
closes https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/issues/730 - omjournal: fix segfault (regression in 8.17.0)
- imptcp: added AF_UNIX support
Thanks to Nathan Brown for implementing this feature. - new template options
- compressSpace
- date-utc
- redis: support for authentication
Thanks to Manohar Ht for the patch - omkafka: makes kafka-producer on-HUP restart optional
As of now, omkafka kills and re-creates kafka-producer on HUP. This
is not always desirable. This change introduces an action param
(reopenOnHup=”on|off”) which allows user to control re-cycling of
kafka-producer.
It defaults to on (for backward compatibility). Off allows user to
ignore HUP as far as kafka-producer is concerned.
Thanks to Janmejay Singh for implementing this feature - imfile: new “FreshStartTail” input parameter
Thanks to Curu Wong for implementing this. - omjournal: fix libfastjson API issues
This module accessed private data members of libfastjson - ommongodb: fix json API issues
This module accessed private data members of libfastjson - testbench improvements (more tests and more thourough tests)
among others:- tests for omjournal added
- tests for KSI subsystem
- tests for priviledge drop statements
- basic test for RELP with TLS
- some previously disabled tests have been re-enabled
- dynamic stats subsystem: a couple of smaller changes
they also involve the format, which is slightly incompatible to
previous version. As this was out only very recently (last version),
we considered this as acceptable.
Thanks to Janmejay Singh for developing this. - foreach loop: now also iterates over objects (not just arrays)
Thanks to Janmejay Singh for developing this. - improvements to the CI environment
- enhancement: queue subsystem is more robst in regard to some corruptions
It is now detected if a .qi file states that the queue contains more
records than there are actually inside the queue files. Previously this
resulted in an emergency switch to direct mode, now the problem is only
reported but processing continues. - enhancement: Allow rsyslog to bind UDP ports even w/out specific
interface being up at the moment.
Alternatively, rsyslog could be ordered after networking, however,
that might have some negative side effects. Also IP_FREEBIND is
recommended by systemd documentation.
Thanks to Nirmoy Das and Marius Tomaschewski for the patch. - cleanup: removed no longer needed json-c compatibility layer
as we now always use libfastjson, we do not need to support old
versions of json-c (libfastjson was based on the newest json-c
version at the time of the fork, which is the newest in regard
to the compatibility layer) - new External plugin for sending metrics to SPM Monitoring SaaS
Thanks to Radu Gheorghe for the patch. - bugfix imfile: fix memory corruption bug when appending @cee
Thanks to Brian Knox for the patch. - bugfix: memory misallocation if position.from and position.to is used
a negative amount of memory is tried to be allocated if position.from
is smaller than the buffer size (at least with json variables). This
usually leads to a segfault.
closes https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/issues/915 - bugfix: fix potential memleak in TCP allowed sender definition
depending on circumstances, a very small leak could happen on each
HUP. This was caused by an invalid macro definition which did not rule
out side effects. - bugfix: $PrivDropToGroupID actually did a name lookup
… instead of using the provided ID - bugfix: small memory leak in imfile
Thanks to Tomas Heinrich for the patch. - bugfix: double free in jsonmesg template
There has to be actual json data in the message (from mmjsonparse,
mmnormalize, imjournal, …) to trigger the crash.
Thanks to Tomas Heinrich for the patch. - bugfix: incorrect formatting of stats when CEE/Json format is used
This lead to ill-formed json being generated - bugfix omfwd: new-style keepalive action parameters did not work
due to being inconsistently spelled inside the code. Note that legacy
parameters $keepalive… always worked
see also: https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/issues/916
Thanks to Devin Christensen for alerting us and an analysis of the
root cause. - bugfix: memory leaks in logctl utility
Detected by clang static analyzer. Note that these leaks CAN happen in
practice and may even be pretty large. This was probably never detected
because the tool is not often used. - bugfix omrelp: fix segfault if no port action parameter was given
closes https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/issues/911 - bugfix imtcp: Messages not terminated by a NL were discarded
… upon connection termination.
Thanks to Tomas Heinrich for the patch.
Coupling with Logstash via Redis
Original post: Recipe: rsyslog + Redis + Logstash by @Sematext
OK, so you want to hook up rsyslog with Logstash. If you don’t remember why you want that, let me give you a few hints:
- Logstash can do lots of things, it’s easy to set up but tends to be too heavy to put on every server
- you have Redis already installed so you can use it as a centralized queue. If you don’t have it yet, it’s worth a try because it’s very light for this kind of workload.
- you have rsyslog on pretty much all your Linux boxes. It’s light and surprisingly capable, so why not make it push to Redis in order to hook it up with Logstash?
In this post, you’ll see how to install and configure the needed components so you can send your local syslog (or tail files with rsyslog) to be buffered in Redis so you can use Logstash to ship them to Elasticsearch, a logging SaaS like Logsene (which exposes the Elasticsearch API for both indexing and searching) so you can search and analyze them with Kibana:
