syslog-ng-announce

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June 2010

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[announce] patterndb project
by Balazs Scheidler 25 Jun '10

25 Jun '10

Hi, By now probably most of you know about patterndb, a powerful framework in syslog-ng that lets you extract structured information from log messages and perform classification at a high speed: http://www.balabit.com/dl/html/syslog-ng-ose-v3.1-guide-admin-en.html/conce… Until now, syslog-ng offered the feature, but no release-quality patterns were produced by the syslog-ng developers. Some samples based on the logcheck database were created, but otherwise every syslog-ng user had to create her samples manually, possibly repeating work performed by others. Since this calls out to be a community project, I'm hereby starting one. Goals ===== Create release-quality pattern databases that can simply be deployed to an existing syslog-ng installation. The goal of the patterns is to extract structured information from the free-form syslog messages, e.g. create name-value pairs based on the syslog message. Since the key factor when doing something like this is the naming of fields, we're going to create our generic naming guidelines that can be applied to any application in the industry. It is not our goal to implement correllation or any other advanced form of analysis, although we feel that with the results of this project, event correllation and analysis can be performed much easier than without it. Related projects ================ I know there are other efforts in the field, why not simply join them? CEF - is the log message format for a proprietary log analysis engine, primarily meant to be used to hold IP security device logs (firewalls, IPSs, virus gateways etc). The patterndb project aims to create patterns for a wider range of device logs and be more generic in the approach. On the other hand we feel that it might be useful to create a solution for converting db-parser output to the CEF format. CEE - Common Event Expression project by Mitre has a focus on creating a nv pair dictionary for all kinds of devices/log messages out there. Although I might be missing something, but I didn't find the concrete results so far, apart from a nicely looking white paper. If the CEE delivers something, then patterndb would probably adapt the naming/taxonomy structure. But I guess not all devices will start logging in the new shiny format, thus the existing devices would need their logs converted, so the patterndb work wouldn't be wasted. Infrastructure ============== Our original patterndb related plans were to create an easy to use web based interface for editing patterns, but since that project is progressing slowly, I'm calling for a minimalist approach: git based version control of simple plain text files. Of course once the nice web based interface is finished, we're going to be ready to use it. First steps =========== I have created a git repository at: http://git.balabit.hu/bazsi/syslog-ng-patterndb.git This contains the initial version of the naming policy document and a simple schema for SIEM-style and a user login-logout naming schema. If you are interested please read the file README.txt in the git archive, or if you prefer a web browser, use this link: http://git.balabit.hu/?p=bazsi/syslog-ng-patterndb.git;a=blob;f=README.txt;… Licensing ========= I do not have a decision yet, but for sure this is going to use one of the open source licenses or Creative Commons. Let me know if you have a preference in this area. Getting involved ================ Join the syslog-ng mailing list, a start discussing! If you have existing patterns, great. If you don't, it is not late to join. http://lists.balabit.hu/mailman/listinfo/syslog-ng -- Bazsi

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syslog-ng 3.0.7 has been released
by devel＠balabit.hu 11 Jun '10

11 Jun '10

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ PACKAGE : syslog-ng VERSION : 3.0.7 SUMMARY : new stable release DATE : Jun 7, 2010 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ DESCRIPTION: A new stable version of syslog-ng Open Source Edition (3.0.7) has been released. For latest fixes in the 3.0.x branch you are recommended to upgrade to this version. CHANGES: 3.0.7 Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:27:38 +0200 Bugfixes: * When syslog-ng is reloaded, the local hostname value was not refreshed, causing syslog-ng to remember the hostname until the next restart. This may not play nice with DHCP configured hostnames, which may change dynamically. * When several SIGHUP signals are received in quick succession, the last one may have been dropped. This problem is fixed. * Make sure that numbers never get resolved using getpwnam/getgrnam (e.g. libnss functions), because this may cause deadlocks if the NSS provider is LDAP and the LDAP server is trying to log a message to syslog about invalid usernames. * Fixed flush_timeout() handling in for non-file destinations. Enabling flush_lines()/flush_timeout() for a non-file destination, either using a global option, or a per-destination option could cause excess CPU usage as long as the destination wasn't writable. Other changes: * Introduced a new, cleaner syntax to specify that the permissions of a file are not to be changed. Use owner/group/perm options of a file without any parameters instead of "-1". The old mechanism had the problem that both per-file and global settings had to use "-1" to effectively stop syslog-ng from changing the uid/gid/perm values. The new syntax will make it possible to specify defaults in the global options section and customize those on a per-file basis. * syslog-ng will not go into the background if either the --syntax-only or --debug options are specified. DOWNLOAD: You can download the source or binary packages from: http://www.balabit.com/network-security/syslog-ng/opensource-logging-system…

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