[syslog-ng] time zones - probably revisited.

[Evan Rempel]

We run central log servers for our entire infrastructure.. This includes collecting, storing and archiving logs for hosts and applications
that we do *not* administer. On a good day, admins for these other hosts are very cooperative and will change configuration as
we instruct them (log line formats, time zone, proper host names etc.) Increasingly vendors are shipping VMware application images.
You just boot the image and configure it via a GIU or web front end. There is no real login on the host for fine grained configuration.
Even the VMware console is almost to this state.

Anyhow, the problem I am running into is that these systems are not logging to our servers with consistent time-zone information.
The time-zone info is in the syslog message, but syslog will not convert it by default.

Enter the destination driver configuration directive of time-zone("+/-XX:YY")
This is almost great :-(
This means that I can convert the incoming time stamps to a specific time zone, but not automatically to the time zone that my syslog-ng server runs in. Where I live we observe daylight savings time (-07:00) and right now we are using standard time (-08:00).
When the time zone changes (PST to PDT then back) I can not get syslog-ng to write the logs with a time zone that follows the PDT->PST->PDT
changes.

If there is a way to do this I would appreciate the info. I could't find it in the Guide or FAQ.

If there isn't ... yet, does it sound reasonable that the time-zone() option be able to take an argument of "local" to allow converting the time zone information to match that of the host.

Thanks.