My home network has several devices that do not have large persistent storage to keep log files. For example, my wireless routers based on OpenWRT doesn’t log to the limited local storage it has, and a Flukso energy metering device log power readings to a ramdisk. These devices log a fair amount of information that I ideally would like to keep for later analysis. I have never before seen a need to setup a syslogd server, thinking that storing logs locally and keeping regular backups of the machine is good enough. However, it appears like this situation calls for a syslogd server. I found an old NSLU2 in my drawer and installed Debian Squeeze on it following Martin Michlmayr’s instructions. I’m using a 4GB USB memory stick for storage, which should hold plenty of log data. I keep backups of the machine in case the USB memory stick wears out.
After customizing the installation to my preferences (disable ssh passwords, disable portmap/rpc.statd/exim4, installing etckeeper, emacs23-nox, etc) I am ready to configure Rsyslog. I found what looked like the perfect configuration example, “Storing messages from a remote system into a specific file”, but it requires me to hard code a bit too much information in the configuration file for my taste. Instead, I found the DynFile concept. With a file /etc/rsyslogd.d/logger.conf as below I can point any new device to my log server and it will automatically create a new file for it. And since the dates are embedded into the filename, I get log rotation suitable for rsync-style backups for free.
$ModLoad imudp
$UDPServerRun 514$ModLoad imtcp
$InputTCPServerRun 514$template DynFile,”/var/log/network-%HOSTNAME%-%$year%-%$month%-%$day%.log”
:fromhost-ip, !isequal, “127.0.0.1″ ?DynFile
:fromhost-ip, !isequal, “127.0.0.1″ ~
