[syslog-ng] How to stop syslog-ng from generating HOSTID on start up

[Balazs Scheidler]

Syslog-ng saves this hostid in a persistent storage, so it should generate
it only once, ever.

It is stored in the syslog-ng.persist file. Do you keep that across
restarts? Does this help your use case?

Btw, it should also be possible to populate that persist file with this
entry before starting syslog-ng, maybe to a fixed value. Or the lower 4
bytes of your Mac address, etc. persist-tool has a low level interface to
add such values while syslog-ng is not running

On Wed, Sep 6, 2023, 03:44 Dineth Jayasekera <jayaseke at ualberta.ca> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> When starting up, I've noticed that syslog-ng hangs on our embedded system
> when generating the HOSTID. This is because the HOSTID generation uses
> RAND_bytes (in_create_host_id
> <https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng/blob/66123c955b29298ba6e68cdc77b9a0fdb4aded36/lib/host-id.c#L33>)-
> which needs entropy (which we don't have enough of, and don't want to
> generate).
>
> The logging is only used locally and there is no need for crypto
> functionality. Is there a way to avoid generating a cryptographically
> secure HOSTID on start up?
>
> Thank you!
>
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