Syslog
Quick notes
- Good idea to send logs to a central, secure log collection server
- Better if the server is on another, private network
- Second NIC used would be unnumbered and in promiscuous mode
- Port used is 514/UDP
- Frequent target for hackers; PAM, for example, uses a lot
of syslog.
- Relay loghosts can also be used. If there are many ‘hops’, the final
loghost does not know the source IP- This is fixed by using something like
syslog-ng
- This is fixed by using something like
Anatomy of /etc/syslog.conf
Two parts: A selector and an action. TODO: Convert to HTML…
{|class="wikitable" width="100%"
!colspan="2"|<font color="#FF3300">Selector</font>
|------------
!width="33%"|Facility
!width="33%"|Priority
!width="33%"|<font color="#FF3300">Action</font>
|------------
|
<code>
* auth<br /><small>(Security events get logged with this)</small>
* authpriv<br /><small>(user access messages use this)</small>
* cron<br /><small>(atd and crond daemons)</small>
* daemon<br /><small>(other daemon programs without a facility of their own)</small>
* kern<br /><small>(kernel messages)</small>
* lpr<br /><small>(printing subsystem)</small>
* mail<br /><small>(mail system)</small>
* mark<br /><small>(used by syslogd to produce timestamps in log files)</small>
* news<br /><small>(news system)</small>
* syslog<br /><small>(internal syslog messages)</small>
* user<br /><small>(for user programs)</small>
* uucp local0 – local7<br /><small>(any use; RH uses local7 for boot messages)</small>
* *<br /><small>(for all)</small>
</code>
|valign="top"|
<code>
* emerg<br /><small>(system unavailable)</small>
* alert<br /><small>(immediate action required)</small>
* crit<br /><small>(critical condition)</small>
* err<br /><small>(error)</small>
* warning<br /><small>(what it says)</small>
* notice<br /><small>(normal but significant)</small>
* info<br /><small>(normal)</small>
* debug<br /><small>(debugging info)</small>
</code><br /><small>(Importance, descending)</small>
|valign="top"|
<code>
* /complete/path/of/some/file
* /dev/console
* -/complete/path/of/some/file<br /><small>(Don't flush file each time; better performance but risks loss of some log info.)</small>
* username1[,username2 ...]
* *<br /><small>(all logged in users)</small>
* @remotehost.org
* |/path/to/named/pipe<br /><small>(To send output to a command you must create a named pipe, say /var/lib/cmd.pipe with the mkfifo command. Then start the command with cmd </var/lib/cmd.pipe.)</small>
</code>
|}
Notes & Examples
- Cannot create new facilities. Need to use
local{0,7} - Syslog assumes that the program sending it logs knows how to do so.
- See the
PDF
for examples of selectors
Logger
I use this to quickly test/view a facility or priority
logger [-p facility.priority] [-t tag] message
- The default selector is
user.info - The default tag is
logger.