Recent content on Random thoughts of Peter 'CzP' Czanik
For many years, I didn’t think that Tor could be useful for me. However, I’ve recently found a Gist on GitHub that describes how you can use it to harden your central syslog-ng server. And while I have yet to try it, at least now I have a reason to actually test Tor. The Tor website describes the project as follows: “Protect yourself against tracking, surveillance, and censorship.” I live in a…
Choose your poison: Up until version 4.12, when syslog-ng ran into an error jumping to a saved systemd journal position, it read the journal from the beginning. With the latest syslog-ng version, you can configure what happens in case of such an error. Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-journald-source-how-to-avoid-log-bombs-on-errors syslog-ng logo
Recently I was asked if syslog-ng supports Ubuntu 26.04 (Ubuntu Resolute). Yes, and with the arrival of the syslog-ng 4.12.0 release we also provide ready-to-use packages for it. The release notes mention it, and info is in the Readme on GitHub. I tend to mention FreeBSD and openSUSE more often in my blogs (personal preference), so today I installed Ubuntu 26.04 and tested syslog-ng myself. Read…
For many years, syslog-ng used Java, where C libraries were unavailable. However, over the years native C libraries became available for Elasticsearch and Kafka, and HDFS practically disappeared. As a “scream test”, I am going to disable Java support in all of my syslog-ng packages. Once upon a time, Java support was added to syslog-ng to be able to load Elasticsearch Java drivers. Later, Kafka,…
Today, the syslog-ng team released three different syslog-ng versions, which provided a good opportunity to wear my “Release is coming” t-shirt. This coordinated release is due to an SQL injection security bug fix, even if most likely it affects less than a handful of people (I mean, is there anyone who still uses SQL to store logs in 2026…?) Release is coming What’s new? syslog-ng OSE 4.12.0…
OpenSSL 4.0 was released just over a month ago. So, how is its support progressing in syslog-ng? Well, Git master already supports it, and the patch is easy to backport to earlier releases. At the same time, version 4.12 will support OpenSSL 4.0 out of the box. A month ago, someone from Gentoo Linux reached out to the syslog-ng team about OpenSSL 4.0 support. I asked the community about their…
For many years, the syslog-ng project provided container images based on Debian. Most of our users run syslog-ng on RHEL & compatibles, and have asked for an RPM-based container. So, nightly containers based on Alma Linux are now also available. A while ago, I prepared a small test project to run syslog-ng in an Alma Linux container:…
How can you learn syslog-ng? There are many possibilities, depending on your time and budget. Possibilities range from tutorial series through reading the documentation to instructor-led training. Find out which one is for you! Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/learning-syslog-ng syslog-ng logo
Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 140th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. Streaming syslog-ng data to your lakehouse using OTEL Version 4.11.0 of syslog-ng contains contributions from Databricks related to OAuth2 authentication. Recently, they published a blog about how this enables their customers to send logs to their data lake using…
Fedora 44 was announced last week: syslog-ng 4.11 is part of it. While checking the Fedora Copr build service for Fedora 44, I realized that CentOS 7 and Amazon Linux 2023 packages are also there. I have a few questions about those for you! syslog-ng logo Fedora 44 The availability of the Fedora 44 release was announced last week. Vesion 4.11 of syslog-ng, the current latest release, is part of…
Although OpenSSL 4.0 released just two weeks ago, the syslog-ng project has already received a GitHub issue complaining that we do not support it. So, before we would allocate too much effort on it: what should we expect? OpenSSL 4.0 was announced on April 14: https://openssl-library.org/post/2026-04-14-openssl-40-final-release/ However, this announcement mentions that it is NOT a long-term…
On April’s fool’s day, I shared that syslog-ng can reach 7 million EPS. This test lab result was in part possible thanks to a few performance enhancements coming to syslog-ng version 4.12. How 7 million EPS is possible? Before diving deeper, let me repeat it: 7 million EPS is just a lab testing result, not (yet) possible in the real world. However, the technologies enabling this are already…
This Monday I talked to a couple of friends about work while wearing my Genesi t-shirt. A teacher going back to school after Spring break and an IT guy explaining the nightmare of RTO threat. I love coincidences :-) Why do I say that? Genesi t-shirt As I wrote a few years ago about working from home: “After graduating from university, I worked from home for a small US-based company. I never…
Version 4.11.0 of syslog-ng contains contributions from Databricks related to OAuth2 authentication. Recently, they published a blog about how this enables their customers to send logs to their data lake using syslog-ng and the OpenTelemetry protocol. The syslog-ng project received two contributions from Databricks in the last weeks of 2025. The first one turned the already existing OAuth2 support…
Almost 15 years ago, Balabit had a campaign, stating that syslog-ng could process 650k messages a second. Now I am happy to present 7 million EPS (events per second). Timing the announcement to April 1 is not a coincidence :-) While the 650k EPS measurement was true, it was misleading. This value was measured right after syslog-ng 3.2 introduced multi-threading, in lab environment, under optimal…
My AI mini workstation from HP has seen some non-AI workloads this weekend. I installed Capture One for photo editing and a couple of software synthesizers. And realized along the way that while built-in speakers are nice, high-end audio is a lot better! :-) For months, I have been listening to music on devices that are designed for speech: a pair of Jabra headphones and the speakers of my various…
Once I got hardware-accelerated AI working under Linux on my AI mini workstation from HP, my next goal was to make it easier to use. From this blog, you can read about my initial experiments with Open WebUI on Fedora Linux. Open WebUI talking about central log collection :-) Everything in containers As Open WebUI is not yet available as a package in Fedora, my initial approach was to use…
I have an aging, but fully functional MacBook. I bought it for syslog-ng testing, but I also use for watching movies. Homebrew no more fully supports old, Intel-based Macs. This blog helps to compile the latest syslog-ng release on these old, but otherwise functional machines. Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/compiling-syslog-ng-on-an-old-mac syslog-ng logo
Ever since I bought my AI mini workstation from HP, my goal was to run hardware accelerated artificial intelligence workloads in a Linux environment. Read more to learn how things turned out on Ubuntu and Fedora! I have been using various AI tools for a while now. Generating pictures about some impossible situations, like a dinosaur climbing the Hungarian parliament building, finding information…
Last week, I wrote about my initial FreeBSD experiences on my new toy, an AI workstation from HP. FreeBSD runs lightning fast on it, but the desktop was somewhat problematic. Well, I made lots of improvements this week! A bit of debugging While there are still some rough edges, there have been tons of improvements since last week. I do not have plans to use FreeBSD on the desktop in the long term,…