[syslog-ng] syslog-ng OSE 2.1beta1 release

[Balazs Scheidler]

Dear syslog-ng users,

I'd like to announce the release of syslog-ng Open Source Edition
2.1beta1. This release contains a couple of bugfixes back and forward
ported from other branches and two functionality changes, much requested
previously on this list.

The first is a change in the TCP connection logic to move the DNS lookup
be be part of the TCP reconnection logic, effectively solving the
problem of non-resolvable hostnames, which caused syslog-ng to fail
during startup. The same change also causes the destination hostname to
be resolved again for each new connection attempt.

The second important change was to handle file write error much more
gracefully: whenever a write error occurs, writing to the destination
file is suspended for some time, this way handling disk-full conditions
better.

I'd like to release 2.1.0 real soon now.

The complete list of user-visible changes is below:

2.1beta1
        Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:00:59 +0200

        Bugfixes:
        * Fixed a possible SIGABRT crash if the hosts file passed to
          dns-cache-hosts() had multiple entries with the same IP address.
        * Fixed a bug that caused the persistent DNS cache (e.g. /etc/hosts)
          to be reloaded for all name resolution requests.
        * Fixed a possible crash during startup if "-g" was specified without
          using "-u".
        * Fixed handling more than 256 destinations by changing the
          reference counter type of LogMessages to a 16 bit value.
        * Fixed door initialization on Solaris, the door portion of
          sun-streams() sources did not work in previous releases.
        * Fixed a possible segmentation fault in handling file
          sources that are marked optional and the source file does not
          exist.
        * Fixed the LinkSys style timestamp parser to avoid recognizing
          hostnames starting with numbers as the year value of the
          timestamp.
        * Fixed the year recognition heuristics as the older used the
          previous year in some cases when the client's clock was too fast.

        Other changes:
        * Backported end-of-message search algorithm from PE, which results
          in increased performance and the removal of vague interpretation
          of messages that contain both NUL and NL characters.
        * Removed destination files from the set of polled fds, they are
          always writable anyway and cause performance degradation when a
          lot of destination files are managed.
        * Fixed some FreeBSD and AIX portability issues.
        * Added the BSDTAG macro, implementation by Jung Christian.
        * Changed the reconnection logic in the TCP destination driver to
          reattempt connections for any kind of network problems. Therefore
          an unknown DNS name will not prevent syslog-ng to start up with an
          initialization error.
        * Changed the file write error handling logic to suspend writing to
          a file destination on write errors, but retry it some time later.
          This time interval is controlled by time_reopen() just like with
          other drivers.


-- 
Bazsi