Turris, syslog-ng and me
Yes, it’s a syslog-ng blog from me, and it’s not on https://syslog-ng.com/ :-) The reason is simple: this is not a technical blog. This is my story about how I found the Turris Omnia Linux router and how this lead to working together with the Turris guys.
The beginnings
When I ordered my Turris Omnia, I did not know that it ran syslog-ng. All I knew that it was an ARM device and that it ran Linux. It has a reasonable amount of RAM, storage can be extended, and I can also run containers on it, including my favorite OS: openSUSE. Crowdsourcing was very popular at that time. I ordered my box through Indiegogo.
Working together
Once my Turris Omnia was up and running, I realized that TurrisOS uses syslog-ng for logging. Even if it was an ancient version (3.0), I was very happy about it. I featured the Turris Omnia in some of my blogs as a log source. Finally, a device that could provide me with some interesting real-life log messages!
It turned out that the Turris team has a member whom I already knew from the openSUSE project. We met at conferences, exchanged some e-mails. Soon, syslog-ng was updated to 3.9 in TurrisOS, jumping almost a decade in code and adding many interesting features along the way.
Every now and then, I helped in version updates, suggested new features and changes to the configuration, which helped to greatly extend the feature set of syslog-ng in TurrisOS without adding too many extra dependencies. Using syslog-ng on the Turris Omnia (and most likely on all the other Turris devices), you can now parse many types of incoming log messages and send log messages to Elasticsearch and various cloud services.
Mutual benefits
To me, working with Turris is completely a hobby project. Still, there are mutual benefits both for Turris and Balabit (now One Identity Hungary). I help Turris with syslog-ng and include Turris Omnia in my blogs. It’s a fantastic log source. For example, if you click the YouTube icon in the upper right corner, you will see some timelapse videos built from Turris logs. The blogs describing how to make those heat maps and videos were quite popular for a while: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/creating-heat-maps-using-new-syslog-ng-geoip2-parser
For Turris, it means that even more people learn about their products. For Balabit, it strengthens the syslog-ng everywhere image: running everywhere from embedded devices, like the Kindle e-book reader and Turris Omnia router up to some of the largest HPC clusters of the world.
It was a pleasure working with the Turris team at cz.nic as it allowed me to intersect my work interests with my hobby. Getting swag from them did not hurt either. I am a t-shirt maniac, and the USB converter with four different plugs and a Turris logo is not just nice, but also quite practical :-)
On the photo below you can see me in my latest t-shirt and mask:
