3.6.0alpha2

This is the second alpha release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch, with more internal changes and features compared to the previous 3.6.0alpha1 release. Above the changes in the latest 3.5.6 stable version, this release contains the following noteworthy changes:

Changed defaults

• Threaded mode is now enabled by default. To turn it off, use threaded(no) in the global options section.

• The versioning of the libsyslog-ng internal library has changed: instead of always using the current release number, we will now try to maintain ABI compatibility during the lifetime of a stable branch. Therefore, we use only the first two components of our version as the base of the library version. Another number will be part of the SONAME too, but that will only change when we break compatibility.

  The SONAME is currently set to libsyslog-ng-3.6.so.0, and will remain the same during alpha and beta releases, even when the ABI changes. We will start bumping the version after the first stable release from this branch, if needed.

Features

• The new systemd-syslog() source replaces the former implicit support for the same thing. Users who use systemd are advised to use either the system() source, or this new one when they want to receive logs from systemd via the /run/systemd/journal/syslog socket.

SMTP destination changes

• The smtp() destination now supports a retries() option, which controls how many times a message delivery will be attempted before dropping it.
• The destination no longer counts delivered messages as stored.
• The templates used in the destination now honor the time-zone settings.
• The driver will abort if required options (any of to(), cc(), bcc() and from(), and subject() and body()) are not set.

Bugfixes

• The file() and network() (including tcp() et al) sources will now properly set the $SOURCE macro.
• To build syslog-ng with the MongoDB destination, libmongo-client version 0.1.8+ is now required. (The internal copy has been updated accordingly.)
• The UNIX credential extracting feature was ported to FreeBSD, syslog-ng now compiles, and has support for this feature. (The previous support in alpha1 was sadly incomplete.)
• The pdbtool merge command will now generate version 4 patterndb files.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai, Peter Czanik, Tibor Benke, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa.