[syslog-ng] syslog-ng 3.3.0alpha2 released

[Balazs Scheidler]

Hi,

I'm happy to announce that I've just uploaded syslog-ng 3.3.0alpha2 to
our website. It contains a couple of important bugfixes and some new
features compared to 3.3.0alpha1.

It worked for me quite well, and it endured the first round of testing
by the BalaBit syslog-ng PE team, when they've started working with the
code.

Highlights
==========

syslog-ng 3.3 has a couple of new and interesting features, already in
this alpha release:

 * It uses multiple threads to do its work, thus capable of scaling to
multiple CPUs. Add 'threaded(yes)' to your option block and you're good
to go.

 * Built in mongodb destination for folks who prefer NoSQL over
traditional SQL.

 * This version has a new and improved "pdbtool patternize"
functionality

More exciting stuff is coming.

Known issues
============

I know for certain that it will not work on FreeBSD unless the following
environment variable is set:

IV_EXCLUDE_POLL_METHOD=kqueue

Otherwise syslog-ng will crash at startup, immediately.

Stability
=========

Certainly you wouldn't want to run your production system on this
version, however this code base had endured a couple of test rounds, so
if it compiles and starts up for you (which can be a challenge I can
admit), then the basic functions will most certainly work.

Changes since 3.3.0alpha1
=========================

3.3.0alpha2
	Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:51:36 +0100

	Features:
	========
	* Support for systemd activation added.

	* Add support for customizable token delimiters in "pdbtool
	  patternize", which makes the resulting patterns to have much
	  better quality.

	* Added support for a --no-parse command line option for "pdbtool
	  patternize" to avoid parsing the input as normal syslog messages.

	* Added a new flag 'ignore-errors' to LogWriter based destinations
	  (file, pipe, tcp, udp, syslog)

	* Added support for specifying the suppress() option globally.


	Bugfixes:
	=========
	* Fixed a tcp()/udp()/syslog() destination driver issue that caused
	  aborts during startup.

	* Handle non-epollable devices like /dev/null normally by failling
	  back to the regular file-like handling. Earlier these caused an
	  abort inside ivykis.

	* Makefile fixes to make it possible to compile syslog-ng from a
	  "make dist" tarball.

	* Added error messages about libdbi initialization failures, that
	  would prevent the SQL destination from working.

	* Make it possible to compile against PCRE not in a standard
	  location (caused compilation failures on FreeBSD).

	* Fixed several $(grep) related bugs:

	  - not to cause a segmentation faule when the filter expression
	    supplied contains syntax errors

	  - the template parsing code removed quotes required by filter
	    expressions, with the current change it is possible to use
	    quotes in the filter expressions directly:
               $(grep ('$username' == 'root') $MSG)

	  - fixed the handling of template function invocations within
	    correllation that had multiple messages in its context.

	* Fixed a segmentation fault in pdbtool match --debug-pattern in
	  case there was no matching rule.

	* Fixed "pdbtool test".

	* Added a new macro named $CONTEXT_ID that expands to the current
	  context-id in correllated rules.

	Other changes:
	==============
	* Changed the default syslog-ng.conf version number to 3.3 to match
	  the current version.

	* The pipe() destination used to override the default value of
	  flush_lines() by explicitly setting it to 0. This behaviour has
	  been removed, now the pipe() driver will properly use the default,
	  unless overridden explicitly.

	* Ported the 3.2 linking changes to 3.3, which means that:

	  - libsyslog-ng-patterndb.so is gone, both the command line pdbtool
	    command and the patterndb plugin (libpatterndb.so) links its
	    contents statically, to improve portability on Cygwin.

	  - unit tests & command line utilities link properly in
	    --enable-mixed-linking mode

	* Added debug messages in the correllation code to make it easier to
	  debug correllation rules.

	* Added debug/verbose options to pdbtool.

	Credits:
	========

	Code, bugreports, testing, documentation suggestions and other
	improvements were contributed by:

	  * Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz (PLD Linux)
          * Balazs Scheidler (BalaBit)
          * Balint Kovacs (BalaBit)
          * Corinna Vinschen (RedHat)
          * Dalibor Toman (fortech.cz)
          * Gergely Nagy (BalaBit)
          * Laszlo Boszormenyi (lsc.hu)
          * Marius Tomaschewski (Novell)
          * Peter Czanik (BalaBit)
          * Peter Gyongyosi (BalaBit)
          * Tom Gundersen  (jklm.no)
          * Valentijn Sessink  (blub.net)
          * Zoltan Pallagi (BalaBit)


-- 
Bazsi