In your log snippet, it appears that it is sshd that is logging with the "wrong" timezone. This is a bug in some versions of sshd. Upgrading sshd may fix the specific problem you are having. I can not comment on the behavior of the timezone handling in syslog-ng. Evan Rempel Tim Boyer wrote:
I'm running 2.0.0, and the docs say that
The sender can specify the timezone of the messages. If the incoming message includes a timezone it is associated with the message. Otherwise, the local timezone is assumed.
I'm not specifying any timezone, but I'm seeing a bunch of messages stamped UTC mixed in with EDT, which makes the log a bit... weird:
Jun 24 21:38:01 tolstoy.denmantire.com sshd[7949]: Connection closed by 192.168 Jun 24 17:40:01 tolstoy.denmantire.com crond[7987]: (root) CMD (/usr/lib/sa/sa1 Jun 24 21:43:01 tolstoy.denmantire.com sshd[7994]: Connection closed by 192.168 Jun 24 17:44:34 tolstoy.denmantire.com syslog-ng[11618]: Log statistics; droppe Jun 24 21:48:02 tolstoy.denmantire.com sshd[8036]: Connection closed by 192.168 Jun 24 17:50:01 tolstoy.denmantire.com crond[8082]: (root) CMD (/usr/lib/sa/sa1 Jun 24 21:53:03 tolstoy.denmantire.com sshd[8107]: Connection closed by 192.168
So just to test, I did this:
TZ="UTC+23:56" logger "Look I'm logging from yesterday"
and sure enough, it logged it as yesterday.
So I tried to explicitly set the time zones:
options { send_time_zone(-04:00); recv_time_zone(-04:00);
destination dtolstoy_all { file("/var/log/tolstoy.log" owner(root) group(hobbit) perm(0640) time_zone(-04:00));
Restarted syslog-ng, and:
Jun 24 17:09:00 tolstoy.denmantire.com syslog-ng: syslog-ng startup succeeded Jun 23 21:13:09 tolstoy.denmantire.com tim: Look I'm logging from yesterday
I don't understand why it's not logging as local time without me having to do anything. And I _really_ don't understand why the explicit instructions don't work.
Pounters in the the right direction appreciated...