NAME

syslog.conf —

DESCRIPTION

The syslog.conf file is the configuration file for the syslogd(8) program. It consists of lines of rules for logging, with each line containing at least two fields: the selector field which specifies the types of messages and priorities to which the line applies, and an action field which specifies the action to be taken if a message syslogd(8) receives matches the selection criteria. A rule may also have an option field for a setting that applies only to that rule. The fields are separated by one or more tab characters or spaces. A rule may be divided into several lines if the leading line ends with a single backslash ('\') character. The selector field specifies a pattern of facilities and priorities belonging to the specified action. The action details where or what to do with the selected input. The option field, which must start with the semi-colon option delimiter (';'), currently supports log formatting and log rotation. The default log format is the traditional RFC3164 (included here for completeness), except for remote syslog targets where the BSD format (without both timestamp and hostname) is the default. The user must explicitly set RFC3164 on a remote logging target. RFC5424 is the newest format with RFC3339 time stamps, msgid, structured data, and more. The BSD format cannot be set, it is only the default for remote targets for compatibility reasons.

BSD:

myproc[8710]: Kilroy was here.

RFC3164:

Aug 24 05:14:15 192.0.2.1 myproc[8710]: Kilroy was here.

RFC5424:

2003-08-24T05:14:15.000003-07:00 192.0.2.1 myproc 8710 - - Kilroy was here.

The log rotation, which is only relevant for files, details the max SIZE:COUNT a file can reach before it is rotated, and later compressed. This feature is mostly intended for embedded systems that do not want to have cron or a separate log rotate daemon. Note: the permissions of the rotated files are kept. Meaning the administrator can create all log files, before starting syslog.conf the first time, with the permissions needed for the site. However, if the log files do not exist, syslog.conf will create them with the user and group it runs as and 0644 permissions. Comments, lines starting with a hash mark ('#'), and empty lines are ignored. If an error occurs during parsing the whole line is ignored. Additional options include ‘secure_mode <0-2>’ which is the same as the syslogd -s commandline option. Note: command line option always wins, so you need to drop -s from the command line to use this .conf file option instead. The ‘notify <PATH>’ option specifies the path to an executable program which will get called whenever a log file has been rotated, with the name of the file, less its rotation suffix ‘.0’, as an argument. For example: ‘notify /sbin/on-log-rotate.sh’. Any number of notifiers may be installed. The ‘include <PATH/*.conf>’ option can be used to include all files with names ending in '.conf' and not beginning with a '.' contained in the directory following the keyword. This keyword can only be used in the first level configuration file. The included example /etc/syslog.conf has the following at the end: Note that if you use spaces as separators, your syslog.conf might be incompatible with other Unices or Unix-like systems. This functionality was added for ease of configuration (e.g. it is possible to cut-and-paste into syslog.conf), and to avoid possible mistakes. This change however preserves backwards compatibility with the old style of syslog.conf (i.e., tab characters only).

SELECTORS

The selector field consists of two parts, a facility and a priority, separated by a period ('.'). Both parts are case insensitive and can also be specified as decimal numbers corresponding to the definitions in /usr/include/syslog.h. It is safer to use symbolic names rather than decimal numbers. Both facilities and priorities are described in syslogp(3). The names mentioned below correspond to the similar ‘LOG_FOO’ values in /usr/include/syslog.h. The facility is one of the following keywords:

Code	Facility	Description
0	kern	Kernel log messages
1	user	User-level messages
2	mail	Mail system
3	daemon	General system daemons
4	auth	Security/authorization messages
5	syslog	Messages generated by syslogd
6	lpr	Line printer subsystem
7	news	Network news subsystem
8	uucp	UNIX-to-UNIX copy
9	cron	Clock/cron daemon (BSD, Linux)
10	authpriv	Security/authorization messages (private)
11	ftp	FTP daemon
12	ntp	NTP subsystem
13	security	Log audit
14	console	Log alert
15	unused	Clock/cron daemon (Solaris)
16	local0	Reserved for local/system use
17	local1	Reserved for local/system use
18	local2	Reserved for local/system use
19	local3	Reserved for local/system use
20	local4	Reserved for local/system use
21	local5	Reserved for local/system use
22	local6	Reserved for local/system use
23	local7	Reserved for local/system use

Notice, several of the above listed facilities are not supported by the standard C library (GLIBC, musl libc, or uClibc) on Linux. libsyslog, shipped with sysklogd, however, supports all the above facilities in full. Also, the keyword ‘mark’ is only for internal use and should therefore not be used in applications. The facility specifies the subsystem that produced the message, e.g. all mail programs log with the mail facility, ‘LOG_MAIL’, if they log using syslog. In most cases anyone can log to any facility, so we rely on convention for the correct facility to be chosen. However, generally only the kernel can log to the ‘kern’ facility. This because the implementation of openlog(3) and syslog(3) in GLIBC does not allow logging to the ‘kern’ facility. The priority is one of the following keywords, in ascending order:

Value	Severity	Description
0	emergency	System is unusable
1	alert	Action must be taken immediately
2	critical	Critical conditions
3	error	Error conditions
4	warning	Warning conditions
5	notice	Normal but significant conditions
6	info	Informational messages
7	debug	Debug-level messages

The default log level of most applications is ‘notice’, meaning only ‘notice’ and above are forwarded to syslogd. See setlogmask(3) for more information on how to change the default log level of your application. In addition to the above mentioned facility and priority names, syslogd(8) understands the following extensions:

*

An asterisk ('*') matches all facilities or all priorities, depending on where it is used (before or after the period).

none

The keyword ‘none’ stands for no priority of the given facility.

,

Multiple facilities may be specified for a single priority pattern in one statement using the comma (',') operator to separate the facilities. You may specify as many facilities as you want. Please note that only the facility part from such a statement is taken, a priority part would be ignored.

;

Multiple selectors may be specified for a single action using the semicolon (';') separator. Selectors are processed from left to right, with each selector being able to overwrite preceding ones. Using this behavior you are able to exclude some priorities from the pattern.

=

This version of syslogd(8) has a syntax extension to the original BSD source, which makes its use more intuitive. You may precede every priority with an equation sign ('=') to specify that only this single priority should be matched, instead of the default: this priority and all higher priorities.

!

You may also precede the priority with an exclamation mark ('!') if you want to ignore this priority and all higher priorities. You may even use both the exclamation mark and the equation sign if you want to ignore a single priority. If both extensions are used, the exclamation mark must occur before the equation sign.

ACTIONS

The action field of a rule is the destination or target for a match. It can be a file, a UNIX named pipe, the console, or a remote machine.

Regular File

Typically messages are logged to real files. The filename is specified with an absolute path name. You may prefix each entry with a minus sign ('-') to avoid syncing the file after each log message. Note that you might lose information if the system crashes right after a write attempt. Nevertheless this might give you back some performance, especially if you run programs that use logging in a very verbose manner.

Named Pipes

This version of syslogd(8) supports logging to named pipes (FIFOs). A FIFO, or named pipe, can be used as a destination for log messages by prepending a pipe symbol ('|') to the name of the file. This can be very handy for debugging. Note that the FIFO must be created with the mkfifo(1) command before syslogd is started.

Terminal and Console

If the file you specified is a tty, special tty-handling is done, same with /dev/console.

Remote Machine

Full remote logging support is available in syslogd, i.e. to send messages to a remote syslog server, and and to receive messages from remote hosts. To forward messages to another host, prepend the hostname with the at sign ('@'). If a port number is added after a colon (':') then that port will be used as the destination port rather than the usual syslog port. This feature makes it possible to collect all syslog messages in a network on a central host. This reduces administration needs and can be really helpful when debugging distributed systems. Using a named pipe log method, messages from remote hosts can be sent to a log program. By reading log messages line by line such a program is able to sort log messages by host name or program name on the central log host. This way it is possible to split the log into separate files. By default messages to remote remote hosts were formatted in the original BSD style, without timestamp or hostname. As of syslogd v2.0 the default includes timestamp and hostname. It is also possible to enable the new RFC5424 style formatting, append ';RFC5424' after the hostname.

List of Users

Usually critical messages are also directed to ‘root’ on that machine. You can specify a list of users that ought to receive the log message on their terminal by writing their usernames. You may specify more than one user by separating the usernames with commas (','). Only logged in users will receive the log messages.

Everyone logged on

Emergency messages often go to all users currently online to notify them that something strange is happening with the system. To specify this wall(1) feature use an asterisk ('*').

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

The “kern” facility is usually reserved for messages generated by the local kernel. Other messages logged with facility “kern” are usually translated to facility “user”. This translation can be disabled; see syslogd(8) for details.

FILES

/etc/syslog.conf

syslogd(8) configuration file

/etc/syslog.d/*.conf

Recommended directory for .conf snippets

EXAMPLES

This section lists some examples, partially from actual site setups.

Catch Everything

This example matches all facilities and priorities and stores everything in the file /var/log/syslog in RFC5424 format. Every time the file reaches 10 MiB it is rotated and five files in total are kept, including the non-rotated file.

Critical

This stores all messages of priority ‘crit’ in the file /var/log/critical, with the exception of any kernel messages.

Kernel

This is an example of the 2nd selector overwriting part of the first one. The first selector selects kernel messages of priority ‘info’ and higher. The second selector filters out kernel messages of priority ‘error’ and higher. This leaves just priorities ‘info’, ‘notice’, and ‘warning’ to get logged. The first rule directs any message that has the kernel facility to the file /var/log/kernel. Recall that only the kernel itself can log to this facility. The second statement directs all kernel messages of priority ‘crit’ and higher to the remote host ‘arpa.berkeley.edu’ in RFC5424 style formatting. This is useful, because if the host crashes and the disks get irreparable errors you might not be able to read the stored messages. If they're on a remote host, too, you still can try to find out the reason for the crash. The third rule directs kernel messages of priority ‘crit’ and higher to the actual console, so the person who works on the machine will get them, too. The fourth line tells syslogd to save all kernel messages that come with priorities from ‘info’ up to ‘warning’ in the file /var/log/kernel.info.

Redirecting to a TTY

This directs all messages that use ‘mail.info’ (in source ‘LOG_MAIL | LOG_INFO’) to /dev/tty12, the 12th console. For example the tcpwrapper tcpd(8) uses this as its default.

Redirecting to a file

This pattern matches all messages that come with the ‘mail’ facility, except for the ‘info’ priority. These will be stored in the file /var/log/mail.

Single Priority from Two Facilities

This will extract all messages that come either with ‘mail.info’ or with ‘news.info’ and store them in the file /var/log/info.

Advanced Filtering, part 1

This logs all messages that come with either the ‘info’ or the ‘notice’ priority into the file /var/log/messages, except for all messages that use the ‘mail’ facility.

Advanced Filtering, part 2

This statement logs all messages that come with the ‘info’ priority to the file /var/log/messages. But any message with either ‘mail’ or the ‘news’ facility are not logged.

Wall Messages

This rule tells syslogd to write all emergency messages to all currently logged in users. This is the wall action.

Alerting Users

This rule directs all messages of priority ‘alert’ or higher to the terminals of the operator, i.e. of the users 'root' and 'eric', if they're logged in.

Log Rotation

This example logs all messages except kernel messages to the file /var/log/messages without syncing ('-') the file after each log message. When the file reaches 100 kiB it is rotated. In total are only 10 rotated files, including the main file itself and compressed files kept. The size argument takes the same modifiers as the syslogd(8) command line option, -r.

Logging to Remote Syslog Server

This rule redirects all messages to one remote host called ‘finlandia’, with RFC5424 style formatting, and another remote host called ‘sibelius’, but on a non-standard port and with RFC3164 formatting (i.e., including timestamp and hostname).

SEE ALSO

syslog(3), syslogd(8)

BUGS

The effects of multiple selectors are sometimes not intuitive. For example “mail.crit,*.err” will select “mail” facility messages at the level of “err” or higher, not at the level of “crit” or higher. In networked environments, note that not all operating systems implement the same set of facilities. The facilities authpriv, cron, ftp, and ntp that are known to this implementation might be absent on the target system. Even worse, DEC UNIX uses facility number 10 (which is authpriv in this implementation) to log events for their AdvFS file system.