[syslog-ng] Windows event logs vs syslog format

[Matthew Hall]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 04:21:48PM -0600, Jerry Riedel wrote:
> Another odd thing that does not appear to be related; syslog-ng 
> created additional folders for my two Windows servers in the /HOSTS 
> folder, this time with the name in all_lower_case and is now putting 
> some of the server log files into one and some into the other!

Probably happening because the host name is showing up in different 
capitalizations in the messages and UNIX has case sensitive file names 
so these capitalization differences appear to be different strings when 
UNIX opens up the files to write out the logs. Try logging to dirs based 
on the host IP instead of the host name.

> It would be nice if there was a configuration switch to tell syslog-ng 
> that the host in question was a Windows host and deal with the format 
> accordingly.

If only it were so simple! But Windows does not even support Syslog 
without proprietary plugins, and nobody agrees which one to use, so 
there are several and every one of them sends a different format of 
message.

> While I realize that the Windows event log format does 
> not match the syslog standard, the free version of EventLogAnalyzer 
> and Kiwi syslog server handle Windows format event logs from Datagram 
> Syslog Agent with no problem.

Sure they do, for one Syslog agent. But there are many of them and none 
of them agree. Thank Microsoft for their ingenious decision to release a 
logging system which supports zero standard and interoperable logging 
protocols out of the box, thus leading to a proliferation of competing 
and incompatible solutions to the same exact problem, hand hacked and 
manually installed, over and over and over again.

I understand your frustrations 100% as I'm up against the same issues 
over here, but let's put credit and discredit where it's due and not 
just blame Balabit and the syslog servers by default.

> Jerry

Cheers,
Matthew.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: syslog-ng-bounces at lists.balabit.hu
> [mailto:syslog-ng-bounces at lists.balabit.hu] On Behalf Of Martin Holste
> Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 3:56 PM
> To: Syslog-ng users' and developers' mailing list
> Subject: Re: [syslog-ng] Windows event logs vs syslog format
> 
> Eventlog-to-Syslog is excellent.  I have a db-parser pattern for it that
> works pretty well, at least for grabbing the event ID and user name along
> with the program and host.  It's free and works on all versions of Windows:
> http://code.google.com/p/eventlog-to-syslog/ .  I like it better than Snare
> because it's much lighter weight.
> 
> --Martin
> 
> On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Jerry Riedel <riedel at codylabs.com> wrote:
> > I have the latest syslog-ng on an Opensuse 11.2 acting as a syslog 
> > server and it is working well except for one thing - the Windows event 
> > logs that are being sent with the Datagram Syslog Agent contain a 
> > space that causes issues. Initially, all of these were going into 
> > /var/log/messages until I added the keep_hostname(yes) argument.
> >
> > After doing that, it now puts the Windows logs into the appropriate 
> > folder under /var/log/hosts/ but it still puts a copy into the 
> > /var/log/messages file. I would like to have that log only contain log
> messages from Opensuse.
> >
> > Is there a configuration setting I am missing, or is this caused by 
> > the fact that the syslog agent does not correct the eventlog message 
> > so that it adheres to the standard syslog message format? If the 
> > latter, does anyone know of an open source/free agent that does this?
> >
> > An example of one of the problematic messages is:
> >
> > Oct  6 11:02:08 cli-fs-1 security[success] 576 NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM 
> > Special privileges assigned to new logon: User Name:CLI-FS-1$ 
> > Domain:(obscured) Logon ID:(0x0,0x11331C8)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Jerry Riedel
> >
> >
> >
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