You may remember the Lumberjack project I wrote about earlier. It is an attempt to improve system logging  by creating conventions and standards to cover structured logs in a general way. Since its inception, a lot of discussion happened on the lumberjack mailing list, a preliminary list of fields to be used got defined, and umberlog, a library to seamlessly start to generate structured logs on Linux systems got published. As things stand we now have a CEE-style message source (in the form of a JSON payload embedded in log messages), but the next logical question arises: How to handle ... [Read More]

I have an HTC Wildfire phone with Android 2.2 but unfortunately it became very-very slow. To tell the truth it was already a slow system when I bought it newly (...) but it had more or less acceptable speed. For now, it has become an almost unusable mobile due to performance problems (it is very slow, sometimes it has hard lag or just freezing) and I couldn't find the reason. I asked some of my friends who also use Wildfire and they also complained about the slow performance and lag. It has a lot of irritating symptoms, for example loading the call-list ... [Read More]

I have been a long time Google user. I was really a kid when I set up my first Google account, then others followed. Throughout the years I have managed my whole online life around two accounts at the same company, with a couple of other email accounts that I did not really communicate to everyone for various reasons. These accounts held my personal calendar, my feed reader, and most importantly, my emails, both personal, and different spam I receive, although I try to keep regular email subscriptions down to a minimum. While Google's services try to comply with the needs of ... [Read More]

I've just uploaded the first release in the upcoming 3.4.x series. This is an incremental step over 3.3.x, continuing to enhance syslog-ng with features that allows more in-depth processing of messages. I consider the most important one the ability to freely combine different kind of processing elements (parser & rewrite rules and filters) with sources and/or destinations and handle the combination as a single object. This is listed "junctions & channels" below, but you can also read more details in this blog post. Certainly, this release is not meant to be used in production, however it also helps if you try ... [Read More]

Hi, syslog-ng PE 4.2 contains a new protocol, RLTP. Perhaps you've already read about it in our marketing materials, but you would like to know what it is and why you need it. RLTP First of all, why is RLTP needed if you are already using TCP, a “reliable stream delivery service that guarantees that all bytes received are the identical bytes sent and in the correct order” (source: wiki) and ensures data stream integrity with acknowledgements? The answer is simple. TCP does not guarantee that the destination application receives the packet; it only guarantees that the destination operating system receives the ... [Read More]

In a lively discussion at the RedHat offices two weeks ago in Brno, a number of well respected individuals were discussing how logging in general, and Linux logging in particular could be improved. As you may have guessed I was invited because of syslog-ng, but representatives of other logging related projects were also in nice numbers: Steve Grubb (auditd), Lennart Poettering (systemd, journald), Rainer Gerhards (rsyslog), William Heinbockel (CEE, Mitre) and a number of nice people from the RedHat team. We discussed a couple of pain points for logging, logging is usually an afterthought during development, computer based processing, correllation of ... [Read More]

Background On 25 January, 2012, the European Commission has proposed a comprehensive reform of the EU's 1995 data protection rules to strengthen online privacy rights and boost Europe's digital economy. Technological progress and globalisation have profoundly changed the way our data is collected, accessed and used. In addition, the 27 EU Member States have implemented the 1995 rules differently, resulting in divergences in enforcement. A single law will do away with the current fragmentation and costly administrative burdens, leading to savings for businesses of around €2.3 billion a year. The initiative will help reinforce consumer confidence in online services, providing a ... [Read More]