A three parts blog series: The syslog-ng disk buffer is one of the most often used syslog-ng options to ensure message delivery. However, it is not always necessary and using the safest variant has serious performance impacts. If you utilize disk-buffer in your syslog-ng configuration, it is worth to make sure that you use a recent syslog-ng version. From this blog, you can learn when to use the disk-buffer option, the main differences between reliable and non-reliable disk-buffer, and why is it worth to use the latest syslog-ng version.

Yes, Microsoft has its own Linux distribution, called CBL-Mariner. It is an internal Linux distribution by Microsoft used for cloud infrastructure and edge products and services. And even if it is not installed in the OS by default, CBL-Mariner also includes syslog-ng. Read the rest of my blog at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/installing-syslog-ng-on-microsoft-linux to learn how to install syslog-ng on it and what features are available. syslog-ng logo

Most people I talked to about buying expensive products are aware of “the law of diminishing returns”. When you buy a product, the more you pay for it the less extra quality you get for the extra spending. However, not many people recognize that the same can be said of most human activities. It is a lie that “just a little more effort” will lift you from above average to the top, as the law of diminishing returns hits even harder.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 became generally available recently. Version 3.35 of syslog-ng has been part of EPEL 9 (the semi-official extra software repo for RHEL maintained by Fedora packagers) for a while and now I enabled a few more destination drivers. I also enabled RHEL 9 support in my unofficial Git snapshot packages, so I can support RHEL 9 together with other RHEL and Fedora versions on the next syslog-ng release.

There are situations where you cannot avoid giving a user full shell access through sudo. A shell with administrative privileges gives complete control over your hosts. Until recently, sudo could only log the start of the shell, not the commands executed within it. You could record sessions with sudo, but watching recordings is boring, time consuming and can still be subverted. Version 1.9.8 introduced logging of sub-commands, but that is not yet available on many systems.

This week I am talking to Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering. He is behind the Talos II and Blackbird boards for IBM POWER9 CPUs. His major claim is creating the first fully owner controlled general purpose computer in a long while. My view of the Talos II and Blackbird systems is that these boards helped to revitalize the open source ecosystem around POWER more than any other efforts (See also: https://peter.

I’m not superstitious, so I never really cared about black cats, Friday the 13th, and other signs of (imagined) trouble. Last Friday (which was the 13th) I had an article printed in a leading computer magazine in Hungary, and I gave my first IRL talk at a conference in well over two years. Best of all, I also met many people, some for the first time in real life. Free Software Conference: sudo talk Last Friday, I gave a talk at the Free Software Conference in Szeged.

Recently, I started my own blog, and as Google Analytics seems to miss a good part of visitors, I wanted to analyze my web server logs myself. I use syslog-ng to read Apache logs, process them, and store them to Elasticsearch. Along the way, I resolve the IP address using a Python parser, analyze the Agent field of the logs, and also use GeoIP to locate the user on the map.

Sudo had many features to help blue teams in their daily job even before 1.9 was released. Session recordings, plugins and others made sure that most administrative access could be controlled and problems easily detected. Version 1.9 introduced Python support, new APIs, centralized session recordings, however some blind spots still remained. Learn how some of the latest sudo features can help you to better control and log administrative access to your hosts.

What hardware to use for a syslog-ng server? It is a frequent question with no definite answer. It depends on many factors: the number and type of sources, the number of logs, the way logs are processed, and so on. My experience is that for the majority users even a Raspberry Pi would be enough. But of course, not for everyone. You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.