Re: [gentoo-user] syslog-ng filtering

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 17 March 2010 01:22:59 Ralph Slooten wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Has anyone here worked out how to filter out syslog messages using
> syslog-ng v3? The old syntax doesn't work (well complains bitterly about
> performance and says to use regex), and no matter what I try I cannot get
> the new syntax to work :-/ I have a syslog-ng server which logs to MySQL
> for multiple clients in a network, however the database just keeps growing
> with irrelevant data I'd prefer to just quietly ignore on the server side.
> 
> I'm trying to filter out (exclude) messages such as:
>   (root) CMD (/root/bin/vmware-checker)
> and
>   (root) CMD (test -x /usr/sbin/run-crons && /usr/sbin/run-crons )
> 
> ==============
> filter myfilter {
>         not match("regex" value("\/usr\/sbin\/run-crons"))
>         and not match("regex" value("vmware-checker"));
> }

Hah! this caught me out too.

The value of "value" cannot be anything arbitrary - syslog-ng has no clue what 
you mean. The value is a field name, either a pre-defined one, or something 
you defined using a parser. The docs are ambiguous on this, it's not clear 
that the supplied values are abstracts. You are truing to search for the 
string "regex" in a field called /usr/bin/vmware-checker.

Which obviously will not work.

I think you want:

match("\/usr\/sbin\/run-crons" value "MESSAGE")

Note that it is MESSAGE. You want the field name, not it's dereferenced value.



> log {
>         source(src);
>         source(remote);
>         filter(myfilter);
>         destination(d_mysql);
> };
> ===============
> 
> However they just keep coming through the filter (ie: not matching the "not
> match" filter). I've tried escaping the slashes, not escaping them ... even
> partial words, but I obviously am missing something somewhere.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Ralph

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com