[syslog-ng] [patch] new feature for file destination: persistent symlinks

[Gabor Nagy (gnagy)]

Hello Andrea!

Thank you for your contribution! We always welcome feedback and contribution from the community!

I've quickly checked your patch, and it looks good. Maybe minor things could be changed, but we will see this during a thorough review.

We integrate patches via pull requests on GitHub. [1]
How would you like to continue this contribution?
Would you like to open a pull request on GitHub?

I see a corner case of the feature: if the filename template is not time-based, like e.g. $PROGRAM or $HOST, it can happen that the symlink is changed several times in a short time.
This is not an argument against the feature, it's just a behaviour that should be considered and documented.
As I see, the feature in general creates a symlink with the name given in "symlink_as" option when a new file is opened.
In other words: the configured symlink always points to the latest file that were opened.


Best Regards,
Gábor

[1] https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng

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From: syslog-ng <syslog-ng-bounces at lists.balabit.hu> on behalf of a.biardi at tiscali.it <a.biardi at tiscali.it>
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Subject: [syslog-ng] [patch] new feature for file destination: persistent symlinks

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Hi all,

I'm new here. I love syslog-ng: it's well written and documented and
each time I need some new feature, I dig up the documentation and I
find it's already implemented!

Like many others, I use macros in file destinations (say,
"/var/log/cron.${YEAR}${MONTH}"), but I also want to maintain a
persistent symlink to the current logfile (that would be
something like "/var/log/cron") in order to have "easier" access if I'm
grepping for something manually.

I couldn't find this feature in syslog-ng, so I wrote the code myself;
in the configuration file, it looks like this:

destination d_file_cron {
  file("/var/log/cron.${YEAR}${MONTH}" symlink_as("/var/log/cron"));
};

It works for me on my Slackware boxes. I'm sharing the patch I put
together, hoping that it may be useful to others and perhaps even
considered for inclusion in mainstream.

>From a functional perspective, the "symlink_as" file inherits both
"create-dirs" and file ownership from its file destination (permissions
are not applicable to symlinks, at least on linux).

Patch applies cleanly to latest production release (3.33). I tried to
keep the original coding style for easier review (admittedly, the code
could have gone into the function that opens the file destination, but
I didn't want to change too much).

Thanks for the good work and happy logging!

Andrea.
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