EPEL6 brings syslog-ng to the latest RHEL, CentOS and SL

The EPEL project (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives with additional high quality packages. Syslog-ng was available for EPEL5 for a long time and is now also added to EPEL6, which provides packages for RHEL6. CentOS is gaining a strong presence in web serving, as almost one third of web servers are now running on this OS: http://blogs.computerworld.com/16596/the_most_popular_web_server_linux_is CentOS 6 should be released any day now. Scientific Linux is developed at CERN and used world wide by the research and higher education community. Version 6 of SL is already available.

EPEL6 has syslog-ng version 3.1, which is not the latest, but has support for most of the patterndb features, except for correlation. It also lacks built-in secure transport (SSL) and database (libdbi) support.

Installing syslog-ng from EPEL is easy (thanks to JPO for the instructions and the package):

• add the EPEL repository using information at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

• yum install --enablerepo=epel syslog-ng

• chkconfig rsyslog off; chkconfig syslog-ng on

• service rsyslog stop; service syslog-ng start

The syslog-ng server is also available with professional support from One Identity. It is called the Premium Edition, and the supplied binaries have support for secure transport, databases (even to commercial SQL servers, like Oracle), and encrypted storage.