Skip to main content

Reasons of my silence

Apart from the previous entry I was not posting to this blog for two months. The reason was that I was heavily involved in the development of BalaBit Audit Player, a graphical application to replay RDP/SSH sessions, recorded by our SCB product.

BAP became much larger than I originally expected, it's about 20k lines of code, and the end of the development was done in a rush to meet our deadline of Sep 1, 2007. We've slipped a couple of days, but we've released BAP 2.0.0 on 7th September. Then I spent a week in Karlsruhe on the 5th Netfilter Developer's Workshop.

I returned to Hungary on Friday, I'm spending the weekend with my parents, and hopefully I can be more active on other things, like the syslog-ng mailing list, or this blog. :)

A release of syslog-ng GPL is long due, hopefully I can prepare it next week. I'll also need to schedule some syslog-ng development time as there are some open feature requests by customers.

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...