I am pleased to announce the initial beta release of the rsyslog package.

Rsyslog has been forked from the sysklogd package. It currently shares its
base design but includes many important enhancements. Most importantly
it supports

- the ability to receive syslog messages via tcp
- direct logging to MySQL database servers
- fully configurable output formats, including
  * high precision timestamps with year ;)
  * access to each of the message parts as well as substrings thereof
    (includes access to facility and priority)
  * access to the raw message received
- compatibility to stock linux syslogd

Rsyslog is GPL'ed software. Details and the download on it can be found at

   http://www.monitorware.com/rsyslog/

This package has performed well in our test environments but it is a beta
release. So you might experience problems of all kind when you try it. So far,
it has been compiled Red Hat and Debian Linux as well as FreeBSD (but BSD
sometimes slips final testing and thus there might be some compile issues).

We would appreciate any feedback from early testers, including bug reports,
additional platforms it runs on and new ideas.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed ideas, patches and bug reports.
Special thanks to Tina Bird for being a constant source of new ideas and also
to Bennett Todd for his suggestions (yes, those back from 2003 also finally
made it into rsyslog ;)).

We hope to receive ample feedback. The more feedback we receive, the more
enhancements will happen (and the faster they will appear). You can
send any feedback and suggestion to the rsyslog mailing list. Archive
and subscription management is available at

http://lists.adiscon.net/mailman/listinfo/rsyslog

Rainer Gerhards
Adiscon