Bazsi's Home Automation blog

I've mentioned shortly in my previous post, but here's a more official announcement: I've released syslog-ng OSE 3.1beta2, containing some important bugfixes. The list of changes: http://www.balabit.com/downloads/syslog-ng/open-source-edition/3.1beta2/changelog-en.txt Thanks to Martin Holste for the feedback he provided, hopefully we can forget about the "beta" part soon.

You may probably know that starting with syslog-ng 3.0, we started poking into the message payload by being able to extract information from the log messages and use that information in structured form for message routing, filtering and storing them as separate fields in a database table. You may have read about patterndb on this blog or on Marci's blog and we have also given talks about it on different conferences: NNM 2009 and LSM/RMLL 2009 . The reason I'm raising the topic here again is that we have now released about 8000 patterns covering about 200 applications for patterndb and are now in the process of creating a community site to maintain this database. You can download the database from www.balabit.com . Also an important thing to know that syslog-ng OSE 3.1 features enhanced performance with regard to handling information extracted from the message payload and it also has support for the latest patterndb database format. So if you want to try the new database, fetc...

I'm proud to announce that syslog-ng OSE 3.1 has been released and uploaded to our webserver. This version is new in two ways: 1) of course it has new features, see below for the most interesting bits 2) it is a "feature release", which means that once syslog-ng 3.2 or syslog-ng 4.0 is released, the support for this release will be ceased. See our new version policy at this link: https://www.balabit.com/network-security/syslog-ng/opensource-logging-system/roadmap.bbx Since the documentation is not yet up to date with this beta release, I'll try to include the most crucial information about the new features right here in this announcement. For those who hurry, here's a link for the source code: https://www.balabit.com/downloads/files/syslog-ng/open-source-edition/3.1beta1/source/syslog-ng_3.1beta1.tar.gz And here are the binaries for Linux/FreeBSD systems: https://www.balabit.com/network-security/syslog-ng/opensource-logging-system/ Select the Downloads tab, and i...

One of my collegues probably felt like crazy and implemented a twitter() destination driver for syslog-ng. Although the value is dubious, I think it is the neatest contribution to syslog-ng so far. :)

Like I announced in one of my previous posts, towards the syslog-ng OSE 4.0 release I'm going to make smaller, short-term supported releases. The first of these, called syslog-ng 3.1 is nearing completion, and thus a status report is due. Here's the original plan (quoting the roadmap page here ): support tags for syslog messages: each message can be marked with one or more tags, then apply filtering based on tags patterndb: add tag support patterndb: v2 database format support patterndb: add parsers for IPv6 addresses and hex numbers converge macros in templates and name-value pairs even more (right now it is not possible to use any macro in match()) I've just pushed out another set of updates to our git repository , which: adds tag support: a new tags() filter and a tags() option for all sources and a builtin logic to assign the syslog-ng source name as a tag (in the format: .source. ) adds support for patterndb v2 and a newly introduced but compatible v3 format ...

BalaBit has grown quite a lot in the last 9 years since it was founded, these days there are about 60 employees and more than 50% of that is working in the development field (give or take a couple, I've lost count some time ago). As we currently work on 4 products, support 5-6 CPU architectures and a host of different Operating Systems, automation in development is a must. We try to automate everything and that means a lot. Some examples: preparing the development workstation for development/testing work in 15 minutes for any of our products building source code for tens of CPU/OS combinations by issuing a single command creating bundles of intermediate components when generating setup packages doing releases test automation and a host of other things Some of these solutions are completely our own development, others are derived from public projects, and as BalaBit tries hard to be a good friend of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) we try to contribute back to projects t...

According to the plan of my recently published syslog-ng OSE roadmap , I've worked on integrating the various patterndb related fixes/enhancements in the syslog-ng OSE 3.1 tree. This now means that OSE 3.1 is now capable of working with all the version2 style pattern databases that syslog-ng Store Box is using. Here is a link for the SSB patterns: http://www.balabit.com/downloads/files/patterndb/1.0-20081117/patterndb/ I still need to work on integrating the new tags framework and the integration between tags and patterndb. Once that is done, I only have one item left for the 3.1 feature release. So with some luck, we can have a new shiny syslog-ng OSE release this summer. Please note that this is not released code yet and is only available via git, however if there's demand, I'm willing to create an alpha release (with binaries) if you want to try it. Just drop me an email, or simply write a comment to this post, and I'm going to create one for you. Stay tuned.

One of my collegues (Péter Höltzl, he does all our trainings) has created a nice detailed example on how to use the parser/rewrite framework to pull in yet another application into syslog: dpkg, the Debian package manager. If you are interested in what rewrite/parser can do for you, but didn't have the time to find out, the blog post is worth a read .

The other day someone wanted a special syslog-ng macro that would expand into digit changing every 5 seconds (e.g. R_UNIXTIME % 5) and although I couldn't give an exact solution to his problem, I've came up with this configuration snippet: rewrite p_date_to_values { set("$R_DATE", value("rdate")); }; filter f_get_second_chunk { match('^... .. [0-9]+:[0-9]+:(?<rdate.second_tens>[0-9])[0-9]$' type(pcre) value('rdate')); }; The way it works is as follows: the rewrite statement sets the name-value pair named "rdate" to $R_DATE (the macro) the filter statement uses Perl Compatible Regular Expressions to parse the value of the "rdate" value and uses a named subpattern on the tens of seconds position to store that character in a value named "rdate.second_tens" Later on in the configuration you can use "rdate.second_tens" just like any other macro/value. This proves t...

I'm sitting at NMN 2009 right now, and although the event title says it is a Nagios meet, I'm going to give a presentation on syslog-ng and the new features that 3.0 brings and an example on how to integrate syslog-ng and Nagios. If you are here and have a question just feel free to find me in the "BalaBit" T-Shirt. :) There's also live streaming on the conference website , so you can catch me at 15:50 Central European Time.

I've updated the syslog-ng OSE roadmap on the syslog-ng webpage to include information about the upcoming syslog-ng version: http://www.balabit.com/network-security/syslog-ng/opensource-logging-system/roadmap/ Also, I'd like to bring the changed release/support policy to your attention, that you can read at the same location above. I'd like to introduce stable track and feature track releases, the first being supported for a long time, whereas feature track releases are only supported until the next feature/stable release is published. When a sufficient number of features were published via feature track releases, the last one becomes stable and the cycle continues. Note that feature releases are NOT development snapshots, they are releases just like the major versions previously, the only difference is that instead of a large feature list like with syslog-ng 3.0 , only a smaller set of changes are included. This makes it possible to publish features more often, always c...

After a long time and a lot of accumulated bugfixes, I've pressed the "release" button and syslog-ng OSE 3.0.2 was published on our website. The first official version to feature binary packages for Linux and BSD platforms. Since there was a long time between 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 the changelog is quite large, however most of it are bugfixes, only some minor enhancements here and there. Hopefully I didn't miss any important bugs and problems. It must be much better stability/functionality wise than 3.0.1 was. The diffstat since 3.0.1: 150 files changed, 4332 insertions(+), 3000 deletions(-) You can also check the patches in our git repository . If you are using the 3.0 branch you are really recommended to check out this release. If you are using anything earlier than 3.0 you are also recommended upgrade, syslog-ng 3.0 is revolutionary to previous versions in many ways , especially if you want to do more to your logs than merely store them in a plain text file.

I've uploaded my OSDC 2009 presentation slides to http://people.balabit.hu/bazsi/slides/osdc-2009-syslog-ng-3.0.odp Which has an example for processing iptables logs with db-parser() and putting the results in a customized SQL table.

I'm going to give a talk on syslog-ng on the upcoming Nordic Nagios Meet 2009. I expect the event to be great fun, just like last year . If you are in the Nordic region and use Nagios, rrdtools or syslog-ng, I recommend to pay a visit as you can meet the primary authors and some active contributors to these projects. If you are there and have anything to ask/talk about syslog-ng, just feel free to approach me, I'm probably going to wear a badge, so you can recognize me :)

I've spent the last week in the nice city of Nuremberg where Open Source Data Center Conference took place, organized by Netways AG . I really liked the talks about Puppet , DRBD and the description of the booking.com infrastructure which runs MySQL. Although I really enjoyed the conference I also had some free time to improve the automatic test program for syslog-ng, which now also covers TLS encrypted source and SQL destinations. I've also implemented a small script to collect coverage data of the testcases, thus right now I know that about 63% of syslog-ng is covered by automatic tests. (initially it was 55% but there were some low hanging fruits). I expect to raise this number easily to around 80%, then it'll probably become much more difficult to increase it further as the rest is error processing paths, and unless I come up with something to inject errors from the testcases those are difficult to test. Of course having a test suite is not a replacement for real-lif...

From Dani-aprilis-25 The reason I was absent from this blog in the couple of last weeks is my now 7 weeks old son, Dániel. You can find a picture of him right here in the post, but some additional ones in my Picasa albums .

I was long pondering with the problem that it is quite tricky to enter regexps into syslog-ng configuration file, since if you enclose the string in double quotes (e.g. in ""), the backslash character needs to be escaped. Since backslash is used in regexps quite often, it can become cumbersome to enter regexps like: match("[a-z\\-]+"); Note that the backslash is doubled because otherwise the syslog-ng string parser would pass the sequence to the regexps compiler as: "[a-z-]+" which is certainly different in meaning what the above expression says. I always remembered that syslog-ng also supports single quotes (aka apostrophes), but I remembered they behaved just as if you used normal quotation marks. Therefore I was thinking about a 3rd string format, one that would not require escaping. However I was reading the related code the other day, and found that apostrophes work exactly the way I planned this 3rd string syntax to behave: not to get in the way when...

After about two weeks being late, my son was born yesterday evening at 22:45CET. He weights 3270g and 56cm. Both the mother and the child are fine and I'm a proud new father. I guess this starts a section in my life, hopefully for the better.

I' happy to announce that BalaBit has decided to make the binary packages for syslog-ng OSE available for free. As you may know, BalaBit has various syslog-ng support packages and as a part of this service it prepared binary installation packages for different platforms. The access to these packages either required a support contract but could also be purchased separately for a yearly fee. With syslog-ng 3.0, the binary packages for syslog-ng OSE will become freely accessible. Since syslog-ng is an open source project, BalaBit planned to finish this task in the Open Source spirit: open and visible to all community members. This also means that the set of packages published with this e-mail is NOT yet release grade, rather it is more of a development snapshot of the current state of affairs. So please don't ruin your production systems with this package, it is more advisable to try them in a test environment (chroot or a dedicated test machine). With all these said, here is the ...

I'm happy as I've received the first question about the new IETF specified syslog-protocol support. There's a need for that after all :)

I didn't realize it is already that time of the year, but I was reminded that I'm going to give a talk on syslog-ng 3.0 on Open Source Data Center conference in Nürnberg, Germany at the end of April. I'm going to talk about the nifty new features of syslog-ng 3.0. It would be very nice to meet syslog-ng users there. :)

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...

If you use GLib on non-Linux platforms such as AIX and think that G_STATIC_MUTEX_INIT does nothing but zero-initialize the mutex, think twice. Although quite clearly stated in the documentation , I thought I was smarter and used a GStaticMutex embedded in a structure that was zero initialized. If you look at the definition of G_STATIC_MUTEX_INIT on most platforms (Linux, Solaris, BSDs), it contains nothing but zeroes. This lead me to the impression that zero filling a GStaticMutex instance is enough to initialize it. In reality it isn't. On AIX this renders the mutex to be entirely useless without warnings or aborts. The results are of course bugs that are difficult to track down and fix. This took me an entire day to figure out, as the SQL driver in syslog-ng had this problem. This was fixed since, but if you are running syslog-ng on AIX with the SQL driver, be sure to have this patch applied .

Finally I could take the time to actually announce the freshly released syslog-ng OSE 3.0 branch. It was uploaded to our website during the winter holidays, but I had to integrate syslog-ng OSE to our new release infrastructure, which among others has a much nicer web interface . Here is a summary on what is new in syslog-ng 3.0: http://www.balabit.com/dl/html/syslog-ng-admin-guide_en.html/ch01s04.html Enjoy!