[syslog-ng] Experiences and question from a newbie

[Stefan Seufert]

Hi,

today i had some free minutes was able to play around with syslog-ng the
first time.

First some experiences I made while installing syslog-ng:

I downloaded the latest releases of libol and syslog-ng nd tried to compile
them on my test-box (2.0.35, a SuSE 5.3 system). The configuration, making
ant the installation of libol succeded without any problems. But when I used
configure in the syslog-ng it was unable to find libol-config although it
had detected libol (It displayed the correct version number). After adding
the source-path of libol to $path I was was able to compile syslog-ng
without any further errors. If this is the normal behaviour it might be a
good idea to add a hint to the documentation. From this point on everything
worked as expected. Thanks for this great product.

Now, some questions:

- In the sample config file in the debian/ subdirectory there is a line wich
states that support for special files is not fully implemented. I am
currently using the "old" syslog-package on one of my hosts to log data into
a FIFO from which the data is fetched by a perl script, analysed and put
into a database. Syslog-ng seems currently not be able to handle fifos
correctly. When can we expect this to be implemented?

- Is there a howto or a detailed description for writing additional
(destination) drivers for syslog-ng? I have serveral ideas how to enhance
syslog-ng by some new drivers (keywords: mail, program, mysql, lpr) and will
maybe able to contribute.

Stefan