Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: rsyslogd

• Created:

• Contributors: ColinWatson, MichaelBiebl

• Packages affected: sysklogd, rsyslog

Summary

Debian is using rsyslog as its system log daemon rather than sysklogd now. Investigate following suit.

Release Note

Ubuntu now uses rsyslog as its system log daemon rather than the older sysklogd. rsyslog has a compatible configuration file format, but is more extensible, including the ability to log to SQL databases.

Rationale

This should cover the _why_: why is this change being proposed, what justifies it, where we see this justified.

User stories

Assumptions

Design

Evaluation

The Debian maintainer of rsyslog (Michael Biebl) was present at the UDS discussion and gave us some feedback on the system logger change in Debian. By and large the switch was pretty painless, with not many bug reports after Lenny. Existing installations were not upgraded to rsyslog. rsyslog provides compatibility with sysklogd's configuration file format, which is used by default (it has multiple compatibility levels). Database modules are split out into separate packages. rsyslog can filter on any part of the log message; for example, it can filter out NetworkManager/ACPI messages.

We looked briefly at syslog-ng. rsyslog has direct compatibility with sysklogd, which syslog-ng does not attempt. syslog-ng has a commercial "premium edition" and an "open source edition". rsyslog upstream has been very receptive indeed to changes. There seems no compelling reason for Ubuntu to use syslog-ng, and the fact that Debian is using rsyslog is in itself quite a compelling reason for us.

Canonical's Ubuntu support department currently recommends the use of rsyslog with SQL database logging to customers with that requirement.

In short: we will switch to rsyslog for Karmic.

Implementation

This section should describe a plan of action (the "how") to implement the changes discussed. Could include subsections like:

UI Changes

Should cover changes required to the UI, or specific UI that is required to implement this

Code Changes

Code changes should include an overview of what needs to change, and in some cases even the specific details.

Migration

We would prefer to upgrade existing installations to rsyslog, since it should not be too risky and it reduces our total support footprint. This means that we will have to deal with configuration file migration, and note that /etc/rsyslog.conf is a conffile.

The simplest answer appears to be to copy /etc/syslog.conf to /etc/rsyslog.d/something.conf, which will not be a conffile; the postinst will ship a default for it for the fresh-install case. We then remove the default logging configuration from /etc/rsyslog.conf and rely on the built-in $IncludeConfig /etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf rule.

In the event that this fails for some reason, there are a number of other obvious fallbacks, such as declaring that a sysadmin edit to /etc/syslog.conf can safely be transferred to /etc/rsyslog.conf despite the usual rules on maintainer scripts editing conffiles. We would prefer to avoid this, but if need be it seems to be borderline acceptable.

Test/Demo Plan

It's important that we are able to test new features, and demonstrate them to users. Use this section to describe a short plan that anybody can follow that demonstrates the feature is working. This can then be used during testing, and to show off after release. Please add an entry to http://testcases.qa.ubuntu.com/Coverage/NewFeatures for tracking test coverage.

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Unresolved issues

This should highlight any issues that should be addressed in further specifications, and not problems with the specification itself; since any specification with problems cannot be approved.

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.

ubuntu-minimal Depends: rsyslog | system-log-daemon? (would have to hack metapackage autogeneration)

future work on native Oracle backend with improved batching

package integration work, at least for anything with a chroot (cf. postfix)

beware bug 255635

CategorySpec