I have a openSUSE 11.3 system that I installed syslog-ng on through package management. The intention of the simple config is to get it to write log file messages from one program (pdns) to a separate log file outside of /var/log. No matter what I do with the file and directory permissions, I always get something like: syslog-ng[17864]: Error opening file for writing; filename='/opt/home/user/logs/pdns.log', error='Permission denied (13)' in the log file. syslog-ng is running as root, as follows: # ps xo pid,ppid,user,cmd | grep syslog 17863 1 root supervising syslog-ng 17864 17863 root /sbin/syslog-ng The special config lines in /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf look like this: filter f_dyson { match('^pdns'); }; destination dyson { file("/opt/home/user/logs/pdns.log" perm(0644)); }; log { source(src); filter(f_dyson); destination(dyson); }; Googling around indicated a possible problem with capability management, but that is turned off in my version: # syslog-ng --version syslog-ng 3.1.1 Installer-Version: 3.1.1 Revision: ssh+git://bazsi@git.balabit//var/scm/git/syslog-ng/syslog-ng-ose--mainline--3.1#master#8747d74491eac3fdf5052194f47a68e659633ca9 Compile-Date: Jul 5 2010 13:47:02 Enable-Threads: off Enable-Debug: off Enable-GProf: off Enable-Memtrace: off Enable-Sun-STREAMS: off Enable-Sun-Door: off Enable-IPv6: on Enable-Spoof-Source: on Enable-TCP-Wrapper: on Enable-SSL: off Enable-SQL: off Enable-Linux-Caps: off Enable-Pcre: on I tried explicitly setting the user/group for the destination file in case syslog-ng was trying to write the file with a non-privileged owner in a directory owned by root.... and also tried setting the directory permissions to 777 just in case. Moving the destination to /var/log/pdns.log works. Of course that's not where I want the file. Anybody have an idea of what might be going on here? Thanks, Bill Snow