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Rewrite the LCFG syslog component

Project ID: 
138
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Description: It has noted that the syslog component is in need of some attention. It suffers from a number of problems:

  • The paths to the syslogd and klogd programs are hardwired in the shell code - prevents use with any other compatible daemon.
  • All the log file paths are hardwired in the shell code.
  • It uses the old-style LCFG templating system to generate m4 files which are then processed to generate the final syslog configuration file. This also means that resources contain m4 statements rather than simple values.

Fedora now uses rsyslog as the default syslogd, and has done since November 2007. This means it is fairly likely to be in RHEL6. It is also used by Debian and Ubuntu so it looks like it is becoming the de facto standard choice for a modern syslogd. It supports the old config file but also has lots of other nice features which could be useful. It is also highly desirable to make the component generic enough to support multiple different syslogds. Alternatively it might be good to write a specific rsyslog component which makes it possible to enable the fancy features via LCFG. We might even want to do both of these.

See the rsyslog website for more details on rsyslog.

There is an rsyslog package available in SL5 but it's version 2.0 which is somewhat behind the current stable version.

Deliverables: A new LCFG syslog component.

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