Hi, PZolee wrote a quite lengthy blog post on troubleshooting and debuging syslog-ng [1] back in December 2009. It popped into my mind that running syslog-ng with debug/trace/verbose option enabled is very handy, but sometimes you do not want to stop syslog-ng just to restart it in a more verbose mode. My idea was to enable syslog-ng to real-time modify these verbosity settings through the control socket which is currently only used for exporting statistical information. I extended the control socket communication to have the ability of modify these logging settings. To make life easier I have created a small utility called slngctl which can be used to communicate with the running syslog-ng process. Using slngctl it also easy to query the statistics collected by syslog-ng. Also on longer term I think other useful small features could be added the slngctl. slngctl commands: marci@octane:$ slngctl Possible commands are: stats Dump syslog-ng statistics verbose Enable/query verbose messages debug Enable/query debug messages trace Enable/query trace messages Querying statistics: marci@octane:$ slngctl stats destination;d_out;;a;processed;0 global;payload_reallocs;;a;processed;0 source;s_tcp;;a;processed;0 global;msg_clones;;a;processed;0 global;sdata_updates;;a;processed;0 center;;received;a;processed;0 center;;queued;a;processed;0 Getting current verbose settings: marci@octane:$ slngctl verbose VERBOSE=1 Enabling trace run-time: marci@octane:$ slngctl trace TRACE=0 marci@octane:$ slngctl trace -s 1 marci@octane:$ slngctl trace TRACE=1 As always you can find the source code in my 3.1 git repository and all feedbacks are very welcome. best, Marton PS: I know slngctl might not be the best name, so I offer a bier to anyone suggesting a better name when visiting us in Budapest, Hungary. :) [1] http://pzolee.blogs.balabit.com/2009/12/troubleshooting-and-debugging-syslog... -- Key fingerprint = F78C 25CA 5F88 6FAF EA21 779D 3279 9F9E 1155 670D