RSyslog - History

Rsyslog is a GPL-ed, enhanced syslogd. Among others, it offers support for reliable syslog over TCP, writing to MySQL databases and fully configurable output formats (including great timestamps). Rsyslog was initiated by Rainer Gerhards. It has been forked from the sysklogd standard package. The goal of the rsyslog project is to provide a more configurable and reliable syslog deamon while retaining drop-in replacement capabilities for stock syslogd. By "reliable", we mean support for reliable transmission modes like TCP or RFC 3195 (syslog-reliable). We do NOT imply that the sysklogd package is unreliable. In fact, the opposite is the case and we assume that for the time being the well-used sysklogd package offers better program reliability than our brand-new modifications to it.

The name "rsyslog" stems back to the planned support for syslog-reliable. Ironically, the initial release of rsyslog did NEITHER support syslog-reliable NOR tcp based syslog. Instead, it contains enhanced configurability and other enhancements (like database support). The reason for this is that full support for RFC 3195 would require even more changes and especially fundamental architectural changes. Also, questions asked on the loganalysis list and at other places indicated that RFC3195 is NOT a prime priority for users, but rather better control over the output format. So here we are, with a rsyslod that covers a lot of enhancements, but not a single one of these that made its name ;) Since version 0.9.2, receiving syslog messages via plain tcp is finally supported, bringing rsyslogd a bit closer to its name.

The next enhancement scheduled is support for the new syslog-protocol internet draft format, not the least to see how easy/complicated it is to implement. We already know that some subleties of syslog-protocol will require at least one considerable architectural change to the syslogd and this might delay things a little. Our immediate goal is to receive feedback and get the bugs out of the current release. Only after that we intend to advance the code and introduce new features.

The database support was included so that our web-based syslog interface can be used. This is another open source project which can be found under http://www.liblogging.org. We highly recommend having a look at it. It might not work for you if you expect thousands of messages per second (because your database won't be able to provide adequate performance), but in many cases it is a very handy analysis and troubleshooting tool.

Rsyslogd supports an enhanced syslog.conf file format, and also works with the standard syslog.conf. In theory, it should be possible to simply replace the syslogd binary with the one that comes with rsyslog. Of course, in order to use any of the new features, you must re-write your syslog.conf. To learn how to do this, please review our commented sample.conf file. It outlines the enhancements over stock syslogd.

If you are interested in the IHE environment, you might be interested to hear that rsyslog supports message with sizes of 32k and more. This feature has been tested, but by default is turned off (as it has some memory footprint that we didn't want to put on users not actually requiring it). Search the file syslogd.c and search for "IHE" - you will find easy and precise instructions on what you need to change (it's just one line of code!).

Be sure to visit Rainer's syslog block to get some more insight into the development of rsyslog and syslog in general.

Some useful links