I love t-shirts, especially those that you’d call logowear. But it’s not the kind of big name fashion logos that I’m referring to. Rather, it’s logowear from my favorite IT companies. I have well over a hundred of these t-shirts, and except when I’m preparing for a special event, I pull a random t-shirt from my collection. Yesterday I happened to wear a power.org t-shirt, while today I’m wearing an OpenPOWER t-shirt, two POWER t-shirts in two days :-) Both of these brought back some nice memories.

The September syslog-ng newsletter is now available: Improved FreeBSD and MacOS support in 4.8.0 Setting the version number in the syslog-ng configuration Switching containers from Debian Testing to Stable You can read it at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2024-10-4-8-0-release-version-number-debian-stable syslog-ng logo

Version 4.8.1 of syslog-ng was released last week. It is a bugfix release, and it contains fixes for problems also reported by members of the Fedora community. The Fedora 41 release is near, so package updates now need some additional testing, and “karma” in Bodhi. You can find information on how to install syslog-ng 4.8.1 from a testing repo on Fedora 41 beta at https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2024-4e812b8a23. This is also the place where you can provide feedback and karma.

This weekend I visited the first Audio Expo in Budapest. It was the first music event I truly enjoyed in years. Even if corridors and rooms were packed, there was enough fresh air. What sets this event apart from other events is the focus on listening to music on the vendors’ products rather than just the speeds and feeds on why you should buy their products. While, of course, the expected outcome is the same, with the emphasis on listening to live systems, I found the event much more comfortable to walk around.

Two weeks ago, I was at EuroBSDcon and received a feature request for syslog-ng. The user wanted to collect FreeBSD audit logs together with other logs using syslog-ng. Writing a native driver in C is time consuming. However, creating an integration based on the program() source of syslog-ng is not that difficult. This blog shows you the current state of the FreeBSD audit source, how it works, and its limitations. It is also a request for feedback.

Recently I was at EuroBSDCon, where several participants recognized that I am a POWER guy. And they were right, I have been an IBM POWER Champion focusing on open source software on POWER for the past three years. Talos II POWER9 mainboard I got the usual question from people: is there anyone working on an affordable and open source friendly POWER machine? My answer was a definite yes, but also had to admit that I do not know the actual status for any of the projects.

EuroBSDCon was fantastic, as always :-) I talked to many interesting people during the four days about sudo and syslog-ng, and of course also about many other topics. I gave a sudo tutorial, and it went well, with some “students” already planning which features to implement at home. There were many good talks, including one from Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, who was with the FreeBSD project right from the beginning, and worked on BSD even earlier.

Last week I wrote about a campaign that we started to resolve issues on GitHub. Some of the fixes are coming from our enthusiastic community. Thanks to this, there is a new syslog-ng-devel port in MacPorts, where you can enable almost all syslog-ng features even for older MacOS versions and PowerPC hardware. Some of the freshly enabled modules include support for Kafka, GeoIP or OpenTelemetry. From this blog entry, you can learn how to install a legacy or an up-to-date syslog-ng version from MacPorts.

Sudo 1.9.16 is now out, containing mostly bug fixes. However, there are also some new features, like the json_compact option I wrote about a while ago. The other major change is, secure_path is now enabled by default in the sudoers file, and there is a new option to fine-tune its content. Read more at https://www.sudo.ws/posts/2024/09/why-sudo-1.9.16-enables-secure_path-by-default/ Sudo logo

The September syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line: You can also contribute to the syslog-ng OSE documentation The $TRANSPORT macro of syslog-ng Rolling RPM platforms added to the syslog-ng package build system It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2024-09-documentation-transport-macro-rolling-rpms syslog-ng logo