Skip to main content

Almost released syslog-ng 1.9.10

... but at the end I didn't. I prepared the NEWS file, changed version number etc, but the end it turned out that one of my unit test program which tests macro expansions failed.

I still have not looked into the issue, hopefully it is only the test program, time related macros seem to use a bad timezone offset. Again I seem to have made a timezone related bug :(

Although timezones and time related functions seem to be simple at first, it proved to be a problematic area, it already had a lot of bugs and again here is this one. Not to mention the problem that different platforms have different set of variables/functions to cover the issue. For instance "timezone" is a global variable on Linux and a function on BSD. Linux has a "tm_gmtoff" member in "struct tm", BSD doesn't.

OK, I quit whining now :) Hopefully I'm going to have some free time to look into this bug in the nearfuture.

I also have two other issues on my radar for syslog-ng 1.9.10, first I've received some reports about missing configuration keywords (namely bad_hostnames and check_hostnames), and second I want to change some currently reserved words to identifiers, so that "kernel" can be used as the name of sources again. And oh yes, I have also received a report on an abort(), although I don't have enough info on this one yet.

One thing is certain: the 1.9.10 release of syslog-ng is coming.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

syslog-ng fun with performance

I like christmas for a number of reasons: in addition to the traditional "meet and have fun with your family", eat lots of delicious food and so on, I like it because this is the season of the year when I have some time to do whatever I feel like. This year I felt like doing some syslog-ng performance analysis. After reading Ulrich Deppert's series about stuff "What every programmer should know about memory" on LWN, I thought I'm more than prepared to improve syslog-ng performance. Before going any further, I'd recommend this reading to any programmer, it's a bit long but every second reading it is worth it. As you need to measure performance in order to improve it, I wrote a tool called "loggen". This program generates messages messages at a user-specifyable rate. Apart from the git repository you can get this tool from the latest syslog-ng snapshots. Loggen supports TCP, UDP and UNIX domain sockets, so really almost everything can be me...

syslog-ng roadmap 2.1 & 2.2

We had a meeting on the syslog-ng roadmap today where we decided some important things, and I thought I'd use this channel to tell you about it. The Open Source Edition will see a 2.1 release incorporating all core changes currently in the Premium Edition and additionally the SQL destination driver. We are going to start development on the 2.2 PE features, but some of those will also be incorporated in the open source version: support for the latest work of IETF syslog protocols unique sequence numbering for messages support for parsing message contents Previously syslog-ng followed the odd/even version numbering to denote development/stable releases. I'm going to abandon this numbering now: the next syslog-ng OSE release is going to have a 2.1 version number and will basically come out with tested code changes only. The current feature set in PE were developed in a closed manner and I don't want to repeat this mistake. The features that were decided to be part of the Open ...

An introduction to db-parser()

As promised on the mailing list here comes a short description of the new db-parser functionality of syslog-ng. For an introduction to parsers in general see my previous blog post here . The aim for db-parser is two-fold: extract interesting information from a log message attach tags to a log message for later classification. For instance here's a log sample (lines broken for readability): Feb 24 11:55:22 bzorp sshd[4376]: Accepted password for bazsi \ from 10.50.0.247 port 42156 ssh2 This message states that a user named "bazsi" has logged into the host named "bzorp" using SSH2 from the quoted IP and port. When you read this message as a human, the event that happened is perfectly clear. However if it is not a human, but a piece of software that has to make out the meaning of the message, you need to identify the event (e.g. that a user login has happened) and the additional information associated with the event (e.g. that he used 10.50.0.247 as the cl...