MonitorWare Knowledge Base

Hi,

I know that rsyslog is now in Centos, but I am worried that the version seems to be 2.0.0-11 (rsyslog.i386 0:2.0.0-11.el5) how stable is this version?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Rob

• Custom written rsyslog.conf?
• Maintenance Contract?
• Installation support?

Hi Rob,

v2 in general is very stable, I'd say even more stable than v3-stable. However, it is missing many features. Also, the 2.0.0 version is outdated. The current v2-stable is 2.0.5 (still being maintained). You can check the release history which fixes are missing in 2.0.0, but there are quite some.

Rainer

are any of the fixes major i.e. will it crash? we are looking at it for our production environment.

This is the relevant part of the ChangeLog:

Version 2.0.5 STABLE (rgerhards), 2008-05-15
- bugfix: regular expressions inside property replacer did not work
properly
- adapted to liblogging 0.7.1+
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version 2.0.4 STABLE (rgerhards), 2008-03-27
- bugfix: internally generated messages had "FROMHOST" property not set
- bugfix: continue parsing if tag is oversize (discard oversize part) - thanks
to mclaughlin77-at-gmail.com for the patch
- added $HHOUR and $QHOUR system properties - can be used for half- and
quarter-hour logfile rotation
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version 2.0.3 STABLE (rgerhards), 2008-03-12
- bugfix: setting for $EscapeCopntrolCharactersOnReceive was not
properly initialized
- bugfix: resolved potential segfault condition on HUP (extremely
unlikely to happen in practice), for details see tracker:
http://bugzilla.adiscon.com/show_bug.cgi?id=38
- improved the man pages a bit - thanks to Michael Biebl for the patch
- bugfix: not properly initialized data could cause several segfaults if
there were errors in the config file - thanks to varmojfekoj for the patch
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version 2.0.2 STABLE (rgerhards), 2008-02-12
- fixed a bug that could cause invalid string handling via strerror_r
varmojfekoj provided the patch - many thanks!
- added x-info field to rsyslogd startup/shutdown message. Hopefully
points users to right location for further info (many don't even know
they run rsyslog )
- bugfix: suspended actions were not always properly resumed
varmojfekoj provided the patch - many thanks!
- bugfix: errno could be changed during mark processing, leading to
invalid error messages when processing inputs. Thank to varmojfekoj for
pointing out this problem.
- bugfix: trailing ":" of tag was lost while parsing legacy syslog messages
without timestamp - thanks to Anders Blomdell for providing a patch!
- bugfix (doc): misspelled config directive, invalid signal info
- applied some doc fixes from Michel Biebl and cleaned up some no longer
needed files suggested by him
- cleaned up stringbuf.c to fix an annoyance reported by Anders Blomdell
- fixed bug that caused invalid treatment of tabs (HT) in rsyslog.conf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version 2.0.1 STABLE (rgerhards), 2008-01-24
- fixed a bug in integer conversion - but this function was never called,
so it is not really a useful bug fix
- fixed a bug with standard template definitions (not a big deal) - thanks
to varmojfekoj for spotting it
- fixed a bug that caused a potential hang in file and fwd output module
varmojfekoj provided the patch - many thanks!

I do not remember each bug, but it looks like there is enough meat to justify an update. Some of the patches were contributed by Red Hat folks, maybe they made it into their 2.0.0... The last bugfix in 2.0.1 (potential hang) was quite nasty as far as I remember.

Rainer

Most of the rsyslog packages I've touched have been a bit out of date. This isn't surprising given the pace of development, but is a bit tiresome for those of us who prefer package managers. Since I'm not confident in my ability to put together a package from source, I've been installing from source. This should work on CentOS without any trouble, but you do have to save the build directory so you can run a make uninstall later on (if necessary).

-HKS

Hi,

Anyway that you know of to test for the above bug? I couldn't find any info in the bug report.

Cheers,
Rob

I still haven't been able to work out if the latest RedHat version contains the above bug, as I couldn't even work out what the bug is ... :O any help guys?

The distro-specific packages are maintained by individuals, so without talking to them it's difficult to tell whether their 2.0.0 contains backported patches. I did find 2.0.2 for x64 machines at http://centos.karan.org/el5/misc/testing/x86_64/RPMS/ - if you search for rsyslog on the main site (http://centos.karan.org) you might be able to find it for whatever your architecture is.

I'm afraid I don't know how to test for this particular bug, though maybe someone else will remember the details.

-HKS

I suggest building from source instead of trying to find out which patches are included...