Recent Posts
Discussing RTO in my Genesi t-shirt...
This Monday I talked to a couple of friends about work while wearing my Genesi t-shirt. A teacher going back to school after Spring break and an IT guy explaining the nightmare of RTO threat. I love coincidences :-) Why do I say that?
Genesi t-shirt As I wrote a few years ago about working from home: “After graduating from university, I worked from home for a small US-based company. I never met my boss while working there and met only one of my colleagues at a conference in Brussels.
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Streaming syslog-ng data to your lakehouse using OpenTelemetry
Version 4.11.0 of syslog-ng contains contributions from Databricks related to OAuth2 authentication. Recently, they published a blog about how this enables their customers to send logs to their data lake using syslog-ng and the OpenTelemetry protocol.
The syslog-ng project received two contributions from Databricks in the last weeks of 2025. The first one turned the already existing OAuth2 support generic and extensible, so it can be used anywhere, not just with Microsoft Azure (but of course, Azure compatibility was preserved).
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My new toy: April 1 syslog-ng performance tests
Almost 15 years ago, Balabit had a campaign, stating that syslog-ng could process 650k messages a second. Now I am happy to present 7 million EPS (events per second). Timing the announcement to April 1 is not a coincidence :-)
While the 650k EPS measurement was true, it was misleading. This value was measured right after syslog-ng 3.2 introduced multi-threading, in lab environment, under optimal circumstances, using synthetic log messages. However, there was no fine print explaining this, just the statement that syslog-ng could process 650k EPS.
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My new toy: Back to high-end audio
My AI mini workstation from HP has seen some non-AI workloads this weekend. I installed Capture One for photo editing and a couple of software synthesizers. And realized along the way that while built-in speakers are nice, high-end audio is a lot better! :-)
For months, I have been listening to music on devices that are designed for speech: a pair of Jabra headphones and the speakers of my various laptops.
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My new toy: Open WebUI first steps
Once I got hardware-accelerated AI working under Linux on my AI mini workstation from HP, my next goal was to make it easier to use. From this blog, you can read about my initial experiments with Open WebUI on Fedora Linux.
Open WebUI talking about central log collection :-) Everything in containers As Open WebUI is not yet available as a package in Fedora, my initial approach was to use containers.
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Compiling syslog-ng on an old Mac
I have an aging, but fully functional MacBook. I bought it for syslog-ng testing, but I also use for watching movies. Homebrew no more fully supports old, Intel-based Macs. This blog helps to compile the latest syslog-ng release on these old, but otherwise functional machines.
Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/compiling-syslog-ng-on-an-old-mac
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My new toy: first steps with AI on Linux
Ever since I bought my AI mini workstation from HP, my goal was to run hardware accelerated artificial intelligence workloads in a Linux environment. Read more to learn how things turned out on Ubuntu and Fedora!
I have been using various AI tools for a while now. Generating pictures about some impossible situations, like a dinosaur climbing the Hungarian parliament building, finding information where a simple web search is useless, or explaining syslog-ng code to me.
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My new toy: FreeBSD on the HP Z2 mini revisited
Last week, I wrote about my initial FreeBSD experiences on my new toy, an AI workstation from HP. FreeBSD runs lightning fast on it, but the desktop was somewhat problematic. Well, I made lots of improvements this week!
A bit of debugging While there are still some rough edges, there have been tons of improvements since last week. I do not have plans to use FreeBSD on the desktop in the long term, but still, I just could not believe that the FreeBSD GUI is this problematic on this device.
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Central log collection - more than just compliance
I often hear, even at security conferences that “no central log collection here” or “we have something due to compliance”. Central logging is more than just compliance. It makes logs easier to use, available and secure, thus making your life easier in operations, security, development, but also in marketing, sales, and so on.
What are logs and what is central log collection? Most operating systems and applications keep track of what they are doing.
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My new toy: AI first steps with the HP Z2 Mini
In the past few weeks, I installed five different operating systems on my latest toy: an AI workstation from HP. I love playing with OSes, but my main goal with the new machine is to learn various aspects of AI. I took my first steps in this adventure on Windows.
Of course, you might ask: why on Windows? Well, it’s easy: because it’s easy… :-) There is nothing to install or configure there, as Windows has multiple built-in apps that support AI and can utilize the NPU (hardware-accelerated AI) support of the AMD Ryzen 395 chip.
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