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

[Dineth Jayasekera]

Thanks Balazs for your help,

Yes I was aware of the persist file, but I was having issues initializing
it in the first place, and when upgrading to a new firmware load. I was not
familiar with persist-tool it looks interesting.

I only need to manually add the HOSTID, I did not have issues with the
other fields in the persist file. I try creating the persist file with the
HOSTID before starting up syslog-ng and see if that fixes the problem.

Thanks!

On Wed, Sep 6, 2023 at 12:28 AM Balazs Scheidler <bazsi77 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>
>>
> ______________________________________________________________________________
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