The ^@ isn't really 'funny', per se; it's a representation of Ctrl-@ which in turn is actually the null character.

ah, i see. i wondered what it was!

Hence I suspect syslog-ng is safely mangling a null somewhere into a readable representation before writing it to the log file.

hmm, strange. is there a way to turn this off? i dont mind that the date isn't displaying, and it's only affecting the firewall, so it's not a big deal really. it's just annoying to get alert emails that don't actually contain anything useful!

Quite whose fault this is, is another matter.

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