Bazsi's Home Automation blog

This was first posted as a comment under an article on lwn.net, but I thought it was important enough to post it here for others not reading lwn. Please go ahead and read the original article which is about the "Open Core" business model and its problems from the Free Software community point of view. A commenter thought that syslog-ng was an example, which only exists as a marketing tool for the company's commercial offering. Anyway, here's my post: First of all, I want to make it clear that I'm biased on the syslog-ng case, but still wanted to express my opinion here. I'm biased as I'm the primary author of syslog-ng. I think syslog-ng is a completely different case from the one described by Neary. The GPL version is not crippleware, it was never published for marketing purposes only and for the majority of syslog-ng's existence only the Open Source stuff existed. The Premium Edition is only about 3 years old and syslog-ng started in 1998. W...

I've just uploaded syslog-ng 3.2alpha2 to the release directory . The last alpha release didn't compile on all supported platforms and the automatic test-suite was disabled, because it only worked if syslog-ng got installed first. These obstacles have been overcome and together with some fixes and a couple of new features, 3.2alpha2 is now available. I've also forward ported all bugfixes from syslog-ng 3.1.2. For those who are starting to experiment with the 3.2 branch, here's the list of new features compared to 3.1. Those who tried 3.2alpha1, the list of changes compared to 3.2alpha1 is at the end of this post. Since the documentation of syslog-ng is not yet up-to-date with the new features introduced, I've tried to also include URLs for the best known descriptions. The references may not be 100% accurate, but should give anyone interested an idea how to start experimenting. Also, please note that although this is an alpha release, the bulk of the changes are in t...

I was giving a lot of thought recently to the topic of naming name-value pairs in syslog-ng. Until now the only documented rule is stating somewhat vaguely that whenever you use a parser you should choose a name that has at least one dot in it, and this dot must not be the initial character. This means that names like MSG or .SDATA.meta.sequenceId are reserved for syslog-ng, and APACHE.CLIENT_IP is reserved for users. However things became more complex with syslog-ng OSE 3.2. Let's see what sources generate name-value pairs: traditional macros (e.g. $DATE); these are not name-value pairs per-se, but behave much like them, except that they are read-only syslog message fields (e.g. $MSG) if the message is coming from a syslog source filters whenever the 'store-matches' flag is set and the regexp contains groups rewrite rules, whenever the rewrite rule specifies a thus far unknown name-value pair, e.g. set("something" value("name-value.pair")); and of cour...

syslog-ng 1.6.x and 2.0.x versions had lived quite long. A lot of distributions used these versions and never upgraded to the newer ones. This has changed recently, Peter Czanik was busy to help maintainers get to the latest versions. Already available in the latest release: openSUSE FreeBSD ports Mandriva Gentoo portage OpenBSD ports In development branches: Debian Ubuntu Fedora These all carry 3.1.1, which is quite recent (and a successful release too). There are some fixes accumulated in the git tree though, so I hope to get 3.1.2 out of the door soon.