Syslog-ng saves this hostid in a persistent storage, so it should generate it only once, ever.

It is stored in the syslog-ng.persist file. Do you keep that across restarts? Does this help your use case?

Btw, it should also be possible to populate that persist file with this entry before starting syslog-ng, maybe to a fixed value. Or the lower 4 bytes of your Mac address, etc. persist-tool has a low level interface to add such values while syslog-ng is not running 

On Wed, Sep 6, 2023, 03:44 Dineth Jayasekera <jayaseke@ualberta.ca> wrote:

Hi everyone,

When starting up, I've noticed that syslog-ng hangs on our embedded system when generating the HOSTID. This is because the HOSTID generation uses RAND_bytes (in_create_host_id)- which needs entropy (which we don't have enough of, and don't want to generate).

The logging is only used locally and there is no need for crypto functionality. Is there a way to avoid generating a cryptographically secure HOSTID on start up?

Thank you!

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Member info: https://lists.balabit.hu/mailman/listinfo/syslog-ng
Documentation: http://www.balabit.com/support/documentation/?product=syslog-ng
FAQ: http://www.balabit.com/wiki/syslog-ng-faq