Skip to main content

syslog-ng 2.1 is branched

I've just finished preparations for the release of syslog-ng 2.0.3 and now I consider the 2.0.x branch feature complete. As far as I know there's no feature that was present in 1.6.x and missing from the 2.0.x rewrite. The last missing bits were spoof-source and TCP wrapper support, but as those are present in 2.0.3 I consider syslog-ng 2.0 feature complete. I don't plan to add further code that would cause destabilization.

Now some plans about the newly opened 2.1 branch: we (as BalaBit) played with an idea of creating a commercial fork of syslog-ng which could increase the amount of resources that I can allocate to developing syslog-ng code. From 2.1 on, two parallel editions of syslog-ng will become available:
  • syslog-ng 2.1 Open Source Edition: the same as syslog-ng 2.0, available under the GPL
  • syslog-ng 2.1 Premium Edition: a commercial fork of syslog-ng,
The two releases will be produced from the same source tree with some of the commercial functionality stripped during the release process. This ensures that bugfixes/changes that are developed in the branch will automatically be released with the open source edition as well.

In the first release, the difference between the two editions are as follows:
  • TLS support,
  • Support for a Windows agent, capable of sending log messages in syslog-ng's extended log format and TLS encryption.
  • New, updated manual (also covering the Open Source Edition).

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 contributions redefined

syslog-ng has been around for about 12 years now, but I think the biggest change in the project's life is imminent: with the upcoming release of syslog-ng OSE 3.2, syslog-ng will become an independent entity. Until now, syslog-ng was primarily maintained & developed by BalaBit, copyrights needed to be reassigned in order to grant BalaBit special privileges. BalaBit used her privileges to create a dual-licensed fork of syslog-ng, named "syslog-ng Premium Edition". The value we offer over the Open Source Edition of syslog-ng are things that larger enterprises require: support on a large number of UNIX platforms (27 as of 3.1), smaller and larger feature differences (like the encrypted/digitally signed logfile feature) better test coverage and release management longer term support Although perfectly legal, this business model was not welcome in various Free Software communities, and has caused friction and harm, because BalaBit has enjoyed a privilege that no others cou...

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...