7th European BSD Conference: Oct 18-19 2008, Strasbourg, France

Improved NetBSD syslogd

Martin Schütte

Abstract
Martin Schütte has three main goals, defined by three internet drafts to implement:
- TLS transport is the most obvious improvement: it provides a reliable network transport with data encryption and peer authentication. To make full use of this a buffering mechanism to bridge temporary network errors is implemented as well.
- Syslog-protocol extends the message format to use a complete timestamp, include a fully qualified domain name, and allow UTF-8 messages. It also offers a structured data field to unambiguously encode application dependent information.
- Syslog-sign will allow any syslog sender to digitally sign its messages, so their integrity can be verified later. This enable the detection of loss, deletion or other manipulation syslog data after network transfer or archiving on storage media.
Speaker
Martin Schütte is a student of computer science in Potsdam, Germany, and has been working as a part-time system administrator for BSD servers since 2004.
In 2007 Martin Schütte already gave a talk on Syslog at the Chemnitze Linux-Tage (http://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2007/vortraege/detail.html?idx=547 in german; for a newer english version see these slides for a seminar talk: http://fara.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~mschuett/uni/syslog-protocols-080522.pdf).