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syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.2 Administrator Guide – First Edition
The administrator guide for version 3.2 of syslog-ng OSE is available at the BalaBit Documentation Page. Actually, it is mostly the same as the latest draft, except that I incorporated Bazsi’s comments and corrected some minor typos and errors.
The main new features of syslog-ng OSE 3.2 are listed in the Summary of changes section of the guide.
As always, comments and other feedback is greatly appreciated.
syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.2 Administrator Guide – draft
As you might know from my earlier post, I have been working on restructuring the syslog-ng adminguide, and also updating it for the many new features available in syslog-ng OSE 3.2. By now, most of this is complete, and the 3.2 adminguide is in a rough beta shape: it contains information about every important update, but hasn’t yet been thoroughly reviewed, so it probably contains typos and other errors – please report any problems you find directly to me at documentation@balabit.com, or to the syslog-ng mailing list.
The syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.2 Administrator Guide is available on the BalaBit Documentation Page in PDF, HTML, and single-page HTML formats. Links to the main new features of 3.2 are listed below (in the order they appear in the guide, not in order of importance):
5.2. Global and environmental variables
5.3.2. Reusing configuration blocks
6.5. Collecting process accounting logs on Linux
6.9. Collecting the system-specific log messages of a platform
8.3.3. Comparing macro values in filters
13.3. Correlating log messages
13.4. Triggering actions for identified messages
13.5.2. What’s new in the syslog-ng pattern database format V4
15.3. Collecting debugging information with strace, truss, or tusc
And many other clarifications, reordering of sections, and other stuff too numerous to list.
I hope you’ll find it useful, and any feedback or comment is greatly appreciated.
syslog-ng 3.1 Administrator Guide Updates
After a lot of background work, we have released a new version of the syslog-ng 3.1 administrator guides. The updates include several minor typo corrections, the documentation of macros that were somehow missing (like the %FACILITY_NUM macro), and some subtle layout changes.
The more important changes are the following:
- We have updated the documentation of the syslog-ng Agent for IBM System i application, and also moved it to a separate document. Now both the IBM and the Windows agents have their own admin guides.
- The new guides are available as a single-page HTML as well (OSE, PE, IBM, Windows).
- The Reference chapter of the OSE and PE guides received a new template. So far, the options and parameters were listed in tables, which made it difficult to describe some of the options in the detail they deserved. Now every option has a separate section, so we can add detailed descriptions and examples to every option if needed.
- We added a new index that links to the options of the Reference chapter (PE, PE).
Many thanks for my new colleague, Anikó Sebestyén for doing most of the actual updates in these releases, and also to everyone from the syslog-ng mailing list who reported errors and typos in the docs.
As always, the syslog-ng Administrator Guides are available on the BalaBit Documentation Page.
Shell Control Box 2.0.2 Administrator Guide, 4th edition
Recently I have released a minor update to the SCB adminguide. It contains a few tips and tricks in the Chapter 9. Best practices and configuration examples about using SCB in Bastion and nontransparent modes.
Also, this is the first document release that has a single-page HTML version – many of you have requested this to make searching easier. Well, have fun with it!
As always, it is available at the BalaBit Documentation Page.
Shell Control Box Administrator Guide updates
Running a bit late after the release of SCB 2.0.2, updated versions of the Shell Control Box Administrator Guide are available at the BalaBit Documentation Page. It is not that SCB 2.0.2 had that many visible changes, just many smaller problems and corrections about the SCB admin guide piled up since the last release, so the third edition contains close to fifty changes, corrections and clarifications.
I also made some corrections to the SCB 1.1 Administrator Guide, so if you are still running 1.x, you might want to download the new edition for reference.
And if you are planning an upgrade to SCB 2.0, don’t forget to download the latest version of the upgrade guide, because it contains some important clarifications.
The syslog-ng Agent for Windows 3.1 Administrator Guide
The first edition of the separate The syslog-ng Agent for Windows 3.1 Administrator Guide is available at the BalaBit Documentation Page. It contains mostly the same information that was earlier available in the The syslog-ng 3.0 Administrator Guide, except that it has been updated to version 3.1 of the agent, and moved to a separate document.
The future of syslog-ng Agent for Windows documentation
The syslog-ng Agent for Windows application is a log collector and forwarder for Windows (you can also call it an eventlog2syslog converter as well). It is part of the commercial syslog-ng Premium Edition, and so far its documentation was included in The syslog-ng Administrator Guide.
However, it seems that our development team will release the new versions of syslog-ng and the syslog-ng Agent separately from each other, possibly with considerable time between the two releases. For example, version 3.1 of the syslog-ng Agent is expected for next week (or sometime around that), while syslog-ng PE 3.1 won’t be out for a few weeks. This is no problem, because the two applications have different features, roadmaps, etc. Usually, you are not tied to using matching versions either, but this raises some problems for me on the documentation side.
So, in the end, as I am already in the process of splitting up the syslog-ng admin guide anyway, I decided to move the docs for the Windows agent into a separate guide. Expect the first release of The syslog-ng Agent for Windows 3.1 Administrator Guide sometime next week.
syslog-ng 3.0 Administrator Guide, 10th Edition
I originally planned to release this edition of the syslog-ng guide last December, but I kept delaying it because someone always found some smaller issue or typo that needed correction or clarification. Don’t get me wrong, its terrific that people actually read the docs, and even more terrific that some of them take the time to report me their problems or offer their comments (both negative and positive) about it. Just keep them coming, and many thanks to all of you who do.
So, this edition contains a bunch of typo corrections and clarifications about regexp flags and stored regexp matches. The type() parameter of filters is also described in detail (did you even know that it existed? I didn’t).
Pzolee‘s review of the syslog-ng Windows agent chapter also give me a lot of work, and (tada!!) finally I’ve written a man page for loggen. Hopefully, this will be included in the next syslog-ng release as well.
I also wanted to write about the statistics that syslog-ng collects about the processed messages, but I won’t have time for it for a few weeks now, so it’ll have to wait until the next release.
Until then, the current edition of the syslog-ng 3.0 Administrator Guide is available on the BalaBit Documentation Page in HTML and PDF formats.
On the future of the syslog-ng Administrator Guide
I am working on several things about the syslog-ng Administrator Guide in parallel, and I thought you might be interested in the things to come. First, I will release an updated version of the syslog-ng 3.0 guide, containing a bunch of fixes, clarifications and corrections, and also the descriptions of a few filter and regexp parameters that were missing.
As you might already syslog-ng 3.1 is imminent for both the Open Source and the Premium Editions. In the past, it often happened that there were differences in the available features (and bugs) between the OSE and PE editions, mostly because OSE releases were more frequent, and PE just got behind. This caused problems in the documentation as well: when I updated the docs to the latest OSE release, sometimes it was not clear that a new feature is not yet available in the current PE release, which easily led to confusion. Therefore, we have decided to split the documentation into two separate guides, called (not surprisingly) The syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.1 Administrator Guide, and The syslog-ng Premium Edition 3.1 Administrator Guide.
This won’t affect the docs for 3.0 – as new features will be released only in 3.1 and later versions, I think it is better to leave the structure of the 3.0 guide as it is – corrections and fixes will be of course ported and released for the 3.0 admin guide as well.
Later this year I hope to make some more rewriting and restructuring. Originally, when I created main structure of the admin guide, syslog-ng had much less features, and now it reminds me more of a patchwork than a well-structured document. I think it would be best to drop the concept-configuration-reference concept, and discuss the core functionality of syslog-ng in detail at the beginning (sources-destinations-log paths), and describe the additional features in separate chapters. There are many features that deserve their own chapters where they can be described in detail, along with examples, figures, etc.
Also, the table format for describing options and parameters should be changed – many parameters have so complex effect on the behavior of syslog-ng that it cannot be described adequately in a table entry. Most probably I will convert these tables into a series of short sections, or separate tables like how the proxy parameters are described in the Zorp Reference Guide.
syslog-ng Store Box (SSB) 1.1 Administrator Guide
Merely a few hours behind the official syslog-ng Store Box 1.1 release, the updated SSB administrator guide is available from our website in PDF and HTML format.
If you haven’t yet heard about the new features of SSB 1.1, I recommend you to read the news and highlights of SSB 1.1.
Also, as SSB 1.1 is a feature release (the first of the SSB line), make sure to read and understand our version policy before upgrading your production logservers: once you start the upgrade, the only way is forward.
