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Releases: syslog-ng/syslog-ng

syslog-ng-3.7.0alpha1

07 Nov 12:20
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syslog-ng-3.7.0alpha1 Pre-release
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3.7.0alpha1

This is the first alpha release of the syslog-ng OSE 3.7
branch.

Changes compared to the latest stable release (3.6.1):

Features

  • It is possible to create templates without braces.
  • User defined template-function support added.
    User can define template functions in her/his configuration the same
    way she/he would define a template.
  • $(format-cim) template function added into an SCL module.
  • A new choice for inherit-properties implemented that will merge
    all name-value pairs into the new synthetic message, with the most recent
    being beferred over older values.

Developer notes

  • Added implementation for user-defined template functions.
    A new API added, user_template_function_register() that allows
    registering a LogTemplate instance as a template function, dynamically.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies
on volunteers, to do the work necessarily to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing
feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user
of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Balazs Scheidler, Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai,
Peter Czanik, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa

syslog-ng-3.6.1

21 Oct 12:42
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3.6.1

This is the first production ready version of syslog-ng OSE 3.6.
More than 25000 lines fof code changed, with about 500 file modified.
The changes since the latest release are the following:

New dependencies

PCRE is now a required dependency of syslog-ng, and is not optional
anymore.

Changed defaults

  • Threaded mode is now enabled by default. To turn it off, use
    threaded(no) in the global options section.

  • The versioning of the libsyslog-ng internal library has changed:
    instead of always using the current release number, we will now try
    to maintain ABI compatibility during the lifetime of a stable
    branch. Therefore, we use only the first two components of our
    version as the base of the library version. Another number will be
    part of the SONAME too, but that will only change when we break
    compatibility.

    The SONAME is currently set to libsyslog-ng-3.6.so.0, and will
    remain the same during alpha and beta releases, even when the ABI
    changes. We will start bumping the version after the first stable
    release from this branch, if needed.

  • The flush-lines() setting now defaults to 100, rather than 1,
    for increased speed.

Features

New options

  • A new custom-domain() global setting was introduced, which allows
    the administrator to override the local domain name used by
    syslog-ng. It affects all locally generated log messages.
  • Added a use-rcptid() global option, that tells syslog-ng to assign
    a reception ID to each message received and generated by syslog-ng.
    This ID is available as the $RCPTID macro, and is unique on a
    given host. The counter wraps around at 48 bits and is never zero.

New drivers

  • The pseudofile() destination driver is a very simple driver, aimed
    at delivering messages to special files in /proc or /dev. It
    opens and closes the file on each message, instead of keeping it
    open. It does not support templates in the filename, and does not
    have a queue (and as such, is not adequate in high traffic
    situations).
  • The new nodejs() source driver (implemented as an SCL macro) adds
    a source driver that allows syslog-ng to accept messages from
    node.js applications that use the winston logging API.
  • The new systemd-syslog() source replaces the former implicit
    support for the same thing. Users who use systemd are advised to use
    either the system() source, or this new one when they want to
    receive logs from systemd via the /run/systemd/journal/syslog
    socket.
  • The new source driver systemd-journal() reads from the Journal directly,
    not via the syslog forwarding socket. The system() source defaults
    to using this source when systemd is detected.
  • Added groupset rewrite object.
    Groupset allows the user to modify multiple log message properties at once.
    It also allows referencing the old value of the property as the $_ macro.

Features from the Incubator

  • The $(or) template function that returns the first non-empty
    argument is now included in syslog-ng itself.
  • The $(padding) template function, to pad text with custom padding
    to a given length is also included.
  • The $(graphite-output) template function, to be used for sending
    metrics to Graphite was ported over from the Incubator.
    The graphite() destination SCL block is also available now, to
    make it even easier to talk to Graphite.
  • The riemann() destination, which allows sending metrics to the
    Riemann monitoring system was also ported over from the
    Incubator.

Threaded destinations

A number of features were implemented for all threaded destinations:
amqp(), mongodb(), redis(), riemann(), smtp() and stomp().

  • The destinations gained support for SEQNUM persistence: the
    counter will be preserved across reloads and restarts.
  • A new option called retries() was implemented for all of these,
    which controls how many times a message delivery is retried before
    dropping it.
  • The throttle() option is now implemented, and works for all of the
    aforementioned destination drivers.
  • The message delivery loop was optimised to do less sleep/wakeup
    cycles, which should make the drivers not only faster, but more CPU
    friendly too.

Miscellaneous new features

  • The multi-line-mode() option gained a new setting:
    prefix-suffix, which works similarly to the prefix-garbage
    (which is the new name for regexp), except it appends the garbage
    part to the message, instead of discarding it.

    This new mode can be used to work around the absence of a timeout.

  • Filters default to PCRE matching, instead of the previous POSIX
    regexp default.

  • The system() source will now parse @cim marked messages as JSON,
    if the JSON module is available at run-time. This improves
    inter-operation with other software that uses the Common
    Information Model
    .

  • One can now use multiple elements in the key() and exclude()
    options of any value-pairs declaration.

  • It is now possible to load not only a single certificate when using
    TLS, but a certificate chain.

Statistics

  • The stats counter for PROGRAM counters now includes the timestamp of
    the last update.
  • A new stats-lifetime() global option was introduced, which
    controls how often dynamic counters are expired. The timer is not
    exact, some timers may live a little bit longer than the specified
    time.
  • Dynamic counters are now cleaned up every stats-lifetime() minutes
    (defaulting to 10 minutes) instead of only on reloads. This change
    was done to reduce the memory used by dynamic counters.
  • There is now an internal_queue_length statistic, which shows the
    length of the internal queue. This is most useful to see if the
    internal() source is not connected, or if it is not being emptied
    fast enough (which, again, indicates a more serious error).

MongoDB

  • The mongodb() driver now supports authentication, even when using
    replica sets. When re-connecting to another member of the set, the
    driver will automatically re-authenticate.
  • The --with-libmongo-client option of the configure script now
    supports auto as a value, and will then detect whether to use the
    system version of the library or the internal copy. We default to
    auto now, which prefers the system library over the internal copy.
  • The driver does not automatically add an _id field to the message:
    the server will do that automatically, if none is present. This
    allows users to override the field from within their syslog-ng
    config.
  • A new retries() option can be used to tell the driver how many
    times it should try to insert a message into the database before
    giving up (defaults to 3). This fixes the case where a rogue message
    could hold up the entire queue, as it was retried forever.
  • The driver now enables safe-mode() by default.
  • There is now a one-minute timeout for MongoDB operations. If an
    operation times out, it will be considered failed.
  • The driver can now connect to MongoDB via UNIX domain sockets.
  • The double() type hint is now supported by the driver.
  • In the MongoDB destination, reconnecting in a replica-set
    environment now works correctly, and reliably.
  • To build syslog-ng with the MongoDB destination, libmongo-client
    version 0.1.8+ is now required. (The internal copy has been updated
    accordingly.)

SMTP destination changes

  • The smtp() destination now supports a retries() option, which
    controls how many times a message delivery will be attempted before
    dropping it.
  • The templates used in the destination now honor the time-zone
    settings.
  • The driver will abort if required options (any of to(), cc(),
    bcc() and from(), and subject() and body()) are not set.

Unix Domain Sockets

  • The unix-dgram() and unix-stream() sources now extract UNIX
    credentials (PID, UID and GID of the sending application) from the
    passed messages, if any. On Linux, and FreeBSD, the path of the
    executable belonging to PID is extracted too, along with
    command-line arguments.

    The extracted values are available in ${.unix.pid},
    ${.unix.uid}, ${.unix.gid}, ${.unix.exe} and
    ${.unix.cmdline}, respectively.

  • The system() source will overwrite the PID macro with the value of
    ${.unix.pid}, if present.

JSON

  • The json-parser gained an extract-prefix() option, which can be
    used to tell the parser to only extract JSON members from a specific
    subtree of the incoming object.

    Example: json-parser(extract-prefix("foo.bar[5]"));

    Assuming that the incoming object is named msg, this is equivalent
    to the following javascript code: msg.foo.bar[5]

    The resulting expression must be a JSON object, so that syslog-ng
    can extract its members into LogMessage name-value pairs.

    This also works when the top-level object is an array, as
    extract-prefix() allows the use of an array index at the first
    indirection level, for example:
    json-parser(extract-prefix("[5]"));, which translates to msg[5].

  • The $(format-json) template function now handles the double()
    type hint.

Debugging

  • When sending messages to stderr in debug mode, prepend a timestamp
    to the messages.
  • The new $RUNID macro is available for templates, which changes its
    value every time syslog-ng is restarted, but not when reloaded.
  • A Valgrind suppression file was added (available under
    contrib/valgrind/), to aid in debugging memory leaks in syslog-ng.
    It supresses a couple of known false positives, and a few other
    things in third-party libraries.
  • A new utility, system-expand, was added, which returns what the
    system() source would expand to.

Bugfixes

  • The reliability of the usertty() destination driver was greatly
    improved. Previously, some parts of it were not...
Read more

syslog-ng-3.6.0rc2

14 Oct 12:06
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syslog-ng-3.6.0rc2 Pre-release
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3.6.0rc2

This is the second (hopefully last) Release Candidate of the syslog-ng
OSE 3.6 branch. Some release critical bugs found and fixed.

Bugfixes

  • Opening control socket disabled when syslog-ng is used for only
    syntax-checking.
  • Reloading a config file containing runtime error now not ends in a crash,
    it is able to fallback to the original config.
    (runtime error: config file is grammatically valid but containing invalid
    value, eg.: wrong database column name)
  • Casting error eliminated in Riemann destination when metric is applied to
    an empty field.
  • From now, syslog-ng always exclude attributes that conflict with properties
    in Riemann destination (otherwise value of the attribute would override the
    property).
  • Patterndb fixed to apply condition even if context-id is missing.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies
on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing
feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user
of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Balazs Scheidler, Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai,
Viktor Tusa

syslog-ng-3.6.0rc1

26 Sep 11:07
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syslog-ng-3.6.0rc1 Pre-release
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3.6.0rc1

This is the first Release Candidate of the syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch.
Based on our test results this release is almost production ready.

Features

  • Added groupset rewrite object.
    Groupset allows the user to modify multiple log message properties at once.
    It also allows referencing the old value of the property as the $_ macro.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a memory leak during configuration parsing when using rewrite().
  • Change control socket message from notice to debug
  • Fixes for retries() functionality.
    Retry counter incremented by every message write error
    (including network connection errors) which can lead to message lost.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies
on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing
feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user
of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Balazs Scheidler, Brian De Wolf, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai, Peter Czanik,
Tibor Benke, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa.

syslog-ng 3.6.0beta2

11 Sep 11:26
syslog-ng-3.6.0beta2
8b22a01
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syslog-ng 3.6.0beta2 Pre-release
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3.6.0beta2

This is the second beta release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch. Compared to the previous beta, this release contains a few minor features and bugfixes. We expect the next release to be a release candidate, focusing on stability and bugfixes. Testing is most appreciated!

Features

  • It is now possible to load not only a single certificate when using TLS, but a certificate chain.
  • The system() source will not include /dev/kmsg (or /proc/kmsg) when running inside a Linux container.

Bugfixes

  • The in-list() filter was fixed to look at all elements of the list, instead of only the last one.
  • Fixed an assertion when using the match() filter under certain circumstances.
  • The system() source will not add /dev/kmsg (or /proc/kmsg on older kernels) to the default sources if using the systemd journal, because kernel logs are included in the journal.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Balazs Scheidler, Gergely Nagy, Gyorgy Pasztor, Peter Czanik, Tibor Benke.

syslog-ng 3.6.0beta1

03 Sep 12:53
syslog-ng-3.6.0beta1
1bb202f
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syslog-ng 3.6.0beta1 Pre-release
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3.6.0beta1

This is the first beta release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch. Compared to the alphas, this release contains a moderate amount of new functionality and bugfixes. Further releases will focus on stability and bugfixes.

Features

  • One can now use multiple elements in the key() and exclude() options of any value-pairs declaration.
  • A new source driver was added to the syslog-ng: systemd-journal(), which reads from the Journal directly, not via the syslog forwarding socket. The system() source defaults to using this source when systemd is detected.

Bugfixes

  • All the various crypto-related template functions now check that the desired length of the digest is not larger than the digest itself. If a larger value is requested, they will truncate it to the digest length.
  • The $(geoip) template function now works with threaded(yes) too.
  • The unix domain socket credentials code was changed to only build on Linux and FreeBSD. With this change, syslog-ng should compile again on platforms where the OS does not support this, with the feature disabled.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai, Michael Hocke, Tibor Benke, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa.

syslog-ng 3.6.0alpha3

19 Aug 12:45
syslog-ng-3.6.0alpha3
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syslog-ng 3.6.0alpha3 Pre-release
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3.6.0alpha3

This is the third alpha release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch. It is expected to be the last alpha release, with the first beta in about two weeks. This release contains a number of important features and bugfixes:

Changed defaults

  • The flush-lines() setting now defaults to 100, rather than 1, for increased speed.

Features

  • The system() source will now parse @cim marked messages as JSON, if the JSON module is available at run-time. This improves inter-operation with other software that uses the Common Information Model.

Features from the Incubator

  • The $(or) template function that returns the first non-empty argument is now included in syslog-ng itself.
  • The $(padding) template function, to pad text with custom padding to a given length is also included.
  • The $(graphite-output) template function, to be used for sending metrics to Graphite was ported over from the Incubator. The graphite() destination SCL block is also available now, to make it even easier to talk to Graphite.
  • The riemann() destination, which allows sending metrics to the Riemann monitoring system was also ported over from the Incubator.

Threaded destinations

A number of features were implemented for all threaded destinations: amqp(), mongodb(), redis(), riemann(), smtp() and stomp().

  • The destinations gained support for SEQNUM persistence: the counter will be preserved across reloads and restarts.
  • A new option called retries() was implemented for all of these, which controls how many times a message delivery is retried before dropping it.
  • The throttle() option is now implemented, and works for all of the aforementioned destination drivers.
  • The message delivery loop was optimised to do less sleep/wakeup cycles, which should make the drivers not only faster, but more CPU friendly too.

Bugfixes

  • The basicfuncs module was fixed to work correctly on 32-bit architectures.
  • The stored statistics is no longer incremented by various drivers when they mean processed.
  • The type hinting feature is now more picky about what kind of type hints it accepts, allowing one to use template functions in - for example - $(format-json) pairs.

Miscellaneous changes

  • We now ship a "Contributors Guide" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Balazs Scheidler, Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai, Peter Czanik, Robert Fekete, Tibor Benke, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa.

syslog-ng 3.6.0alpha2

11 Aug 13:39
syslog-ng-3.6.0alpha2
f23c067
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syslog-ng 3.6.0alpha2 Pre-release
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3.6.0alpha2

This is the second alpha release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch, with more internal changes and features compared to the previous 3.6.0alpha1 release. Above the changes in the latest 3.5.6 stable version, this release contains the following noteworthy changes:

Changed defaults

  • Threaded mode is now enabled by default. To turn it off, use threaded(no) in the global options section.

  • The versioning of the libsyslog-ng internal library has changed: instead of always using the current release number, we will now try to maintain ABI compatibility during the lifetime of a stable branch. Therefore, we use only the first two components of our version as the base of the library version. Another number will be part of the SONAME too, but that will only change when we break compatibility.

    The SONAME is currently set to libsyslog-ng-3.6.so.0, and will remain the same during alpha and beta releases, even when the ABI changes. We will start bumping the version after the first stable release from this branch, if needed.

Features

  • The new systemd-syslog() source replaces the former implicit support for the same thing. Users who use systemd are advised to use either the system() source, or this new one when they want to receive logs from systemd via the /run/systemd/journal/syslog socket.

SMTP destination changes

  • The smtp() destination now supports a retries() option, which controls how many times a message delivery will be attempted before dropping it.
  • The destination no longer counts delivered messages as stored.
  • The templates used in the destination now honor the time-zone settings.
  • The driver will abort if required options (any of to(), cc(), bcc() and from(), and subject() and body()) are not set.

Bugfixes

  • The file() and network() (including tcp() et al) sources will now properly set the $SOURCE macro.
  • To build syslog-ng with the MongoDB destination, libmongo-client version 0.1.8+ is now required. (The internal copy has been updated accordingly.)
  • The UNIX credential extracting feature was ported to FreeBSD, syslog-ng now compiles, and has support for this feature. (The previous support in alpha1 was sadly incomplete.)
  • The pdbtool merge command will now generate version 4 patterndb files.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai, Peter Czanik, Tibor Benke, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa.

syslog-ng 3.5.6

05 Aug 11:02
v3.5.6
416d315
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This is the sixth bug-fix release for the 3.5.x series. Upgrading from earlier versions is highly recommended, as the changes in this release are very small, yet, also very important for most platforms and workloads.

Bugfixes

  • A major memory leak was fixed in the value-pairs framework, which affects $(format-json), MongoDB, AMQP and more. The leak was supposed to be fixed in 3.5.5, but due to a merging mistake, it was missed.
  • The configure script now detects Linux capabilities properly, there is no need to use --disable-linux-caps on non-Linux platforms anymore.
  • The pdbtool merge command will now generate version 4 patterndb files, instead of version 3.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

These people have helped in this release:

Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Peter Czanik

syslog-ng 3.6.0alpha1

30 Jul 13:17
syslog-ng-3.6.0alpha1
a3e19a3
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syslog-ng 3.6.0alpha1 Pre-release
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3.6.0alpha1

This is the first alpha release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch, a result of about seven months of work, by more than a dozen contributors, touching 379 files, and changing over twenty thousand lines.

Compared to the latest stable release (3.5.5), this alpha release contains the following noteworthy changes:

New dependencies

PCRE is now a required dependency of syslog-ng, and is not optional anymore.

Features

New options

  • A new custom-domain() global setting was introduced, which allows the administrator to override the local domain name used by syslog-ng. It affects all locally generated log messages.
  • Added a use-rcptid() global option, that tells syslog-ng to assign a reception ID to each message received and generated by syslog-ng. This ID is available as the $RCPTID macro, and is unique on a given host. The counter wraps around at 48 bits and is never zero.

New drivers

  • The pseudofile() destination driver is a very simple driver, aimed at delivering messages to special files in /proc or /dev. It opens and closes the file on each message, instead of keeping it open. It does not support templates in the filename, and does not have a queue (and as such, is not adequate in high traffic situations).
  • The new nodejs() source driver (implemented as an SCL macro) adds a source driver that allows syslog-ng to accept messages from node.js applications that use the winston logging API.

Miscellaneous new features

  • The multi-line-mode() option gained a new setting: prefix-suffix, which works similarly to the prefix-garbage (which is the new name for regexp), except it appends the garbage part to the message, instead of discarding it.

    This new mode can be used to work around the absence of a timeout.

  • Filters default to PCRE matching, instead of the previous POSIX regexp default.

Statistics

  • The stats counter for PROGRAM counters now includes the timestamp of the last update.
  • A new stats-lifetime() global option was introduced, which controls how often dynamic counters are expired. The timer is not exact, some timers may live a little bit longer than the specified time.
  • Dynamic counters are now cleaned up every stats-lifetime() minutes (defaulting to 10 minutes) instead of only on reloads. This change was done to reduce the memory used by dynamic counters.
  • There is now an internal_queue_length statistic, which shows the length of the internal queue. This is most useful to see if the internal() source is not connected, or if it is not being emptied fast enough (which, again, indicates a more serious error).

MongoDB

  • The mongodb() driver now supports authentication, even when using replica sets. When re-connecting to another member of the set, the driver will automatically re-authenticate.
  • The --with-libmongo-client option of the configure script now supports auto as a value, and will then detect whether to use the system version of the library or the internal copy. We default to auto now, which prefers the system library over the internal copy.
  • The driver does not automatically add an _id field to the message: the server will do that automatically, if none is present. This allows users to override the field from within their syslog-ng config.
  • A new retries() option can be used to tell the driver how many times it should try to insert a message into the database before giving up (defaults to 3). This fixes the case where a rogue message could hold up the entire queue, as it was retried forever.
  • The driver now enables safe-mode() by default.
  • There is now a one-minute timeout for MongoDB operations. If an operation times out, it will be considered failed.
  • The driver can now connect to MongoDB via UNIX domain sockets.
  • The double() type hint is now supported by the driver.

Unix Domain Sockets

  • The unix-dgram() and unix-stream() sources now extract UNIX credentials (PID, UID and GID of the sending application) from the passed messages, if any. On Linux, and FreeBSD, the path of the executable belonging to PID is extracted too, along with command-line arguments.

    The extracted values are available in ${.unix.pid}, ${.unix.uid}, ${.unix.gid}, ${.unix.exe} and ${.unix.cmdline}, respectively.

  • The system() source will overwrite the PID macro with the value of ${.unix.pid}, if present.

JSON

  • The json-parser gained an extract-prefix() option, which can be used to tell the parser to only extract JSON members from a specific subtree of the incoming object.

    Example: json-parser(extract-prefix("foo.bar[5]"));

    Assuming that the incoming object is named msg, this is equivalent to the following javascript code: msg.foo.bar[5]

    The resulting expression must be a JSON object, so that syslog-ng can extract its members into LogMessage name-value pairs.

    This also works when the top-level object is an array, as extract-prefix() allows the use of an array index at the first indirection level, for example: json-parser(extract-prefix("[5]"));, which translates to msg[5].

  • The $(format-json) template function now handles the double() type hint.

Debugging

  • When sending messages to stderr in debug mode, prepend a timestamp to the messages.
  • The new $RUNID macro is available for templates, which changes its value every time syslog-ng is restarted, but not when reloaded.
  • A Valgrind suppression file was added (available under contrib/valgrind/), to aid in debugging memory leaks in syslog-ng. It supresses a couple of known false positives, and a few other things in third-party libraries.
  • A new utility, system-expand, was added, which returns what the system() source would expand to.

Bugfixes

  • With the MongoDB destination, successfully inserted messages are not counted as "stored" anymore: stored messages are those that are in a memory or disk buffer.

  • In the MongoDB destination, reconnecting in a replica-set environment now works correctly, and reliably.

  • The reliability of the usertty() destination driver was greatly improved. Previously, some parts of it were not thread-safe, which could result in strange behaviour.

  • The handling of escape related flags of csvparser() was changed: instead of these flags overwriting all other (even non-escape related) flags, if the flag to set is an escape-flag, it will keep all non-escape flags, and set the new one. If it is a not such a flag, then it will clear all flags, and set the previous escape flags, and the new flag.

    This, in essence, means that when setting flags on a csvparser(), if it is an escape flag, only escape flags will be affected. If not, then escape flags will not be affected at all.

  • The SQL destination now correctly continues $SEQNUM counting after a reload, instead of starting afresh.

  • When tring to stop syslog-ng while a reload is in progress, syslog-ng will now correctly shut down cleanly.

  • When the local hostname is not an FQDN, and the local resolver fails to return an FQDN too, syslog-ng does not abort anymore, but continues using a non-FQDN hostname after emitting a warning on the internal source.

    Furthermore, syslog-ng will try to resolve the FQDN harder: when multiple names are returned, it will search for the first FQDN one, instead of stopping at the primary name.

  • The update-patterndb script will now work correctly when the current working directory contains .pdb files.

  • We will now correctly handle time going backwards in patterndb: it will realign its idea of current time with the system. This corrects a bug where timeouts did not function properly when system time was set backwards.

  • The Linux capability support is now correctly auto-detected by the configure script, and defaults to off on FreeBSD 9+, as it should.

  • Various memory leak fixes around the code base.

Developer notes

The code base went through a lot of refactoring, too many to list in a simple NEWS file. Groundwork has been laid out for future features which are yet to hit the 3.6 branch.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Andres Tamayo, Balazs Scheidler, Csaba Karsai, Daniel Gados, Evan Rempel, Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Igor Ippolitov, Imre Lazar, Jakub Wilk, Laszlo Budai, Lucas McLane, Martin Bagge, Matyas Koszik, Nick Alcock, Otto Berger, Peter Czanik, Peter Gyongyosi, Sebastien Badia, Sebastiaan Hoogeveen, Tamas Pal, Tibor Benke, Tobias Schwab, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa, Xufeng Zhang