Red Hat's Linux Changes Raise New Questions

itwbennett writes "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."

Comments

One of the advantages of Linux

[Todd Knarr]

That's one of the advantages of Linux: RedHat can go their own way without needing the rest of us to buy in, and without really messing things up for us. If they provide a reasonable API, it'll either be compatible with syslog with a simple library substitution or we'll quickly see a wrapper library that allows programs to use either syslog or Journal without needing code changes.

I think going to binary's a bad idea, myself. The fewer tools you need working to find out what the error is, the easier it is to debug and fix the problem. But let RedHat try this and see how it works, and then we can decide once we've got some real-world data to compare.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[LordLimecat]

There are advantages to not having everything in ascii text, or else we would never see relational databases used for anything. You are right that we will see. I like plain text logs because I am still learning the ins and outs of the major Linux breeds, and not having to learn a special tool for every config file and log makes things easier; but I wont say that there couldnt be benefits to a more robust system.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[skids]

That's one of the advantages of Linux: RedHat can go their own way without needing the rest of us to buy in, and without really messing things up for us.

Not quite true. If PHB insists on RHEL, you're stuck coping with whatever poor choices they make.

Why do I get the sense that all the chafing at the "restrictions" of the LSB/linux-instinct/unix-way/common-sense is just the bellyaching that happens when you realize you're short the talent/energy/whatever to progress and start looking for ways to re-arrange the deck chairs?

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[MightyMartian]

No matter your experience, plain-text logs make more sense, especially in *nix operating systems. You have a vast array of tools to search log files with; my favorites being tail and grep. The minute you go to binary logging your options shrink or you end up having to use additional tools to reconvert it to text (ie. the Windows event log).

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[CAIMLAS]

Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".

Sorry, but no thanks. I can see the need for something else, in a limited/special purpose role, but these assholes are aggregately destroying the very basis of what makes Linux a good, robust server choice:

* you can use traditional unix tools from ssh to manipulate and analyze the system
* there are literally thousands of tools for analyzing, manipulating, and storing syslog data
* init is purely linear, whereas upstart is threaded, increasing the possible ways in which it can fail as well as increasing the difficulty of troubleshooting
* KISS means broken things are more obvious.
* KISS means there's less that can go wrong.
* Most Windows guys don't even read the logs, from what I've seen. This could quite possibly be related to the complexity and lack of utility of Event Viewer itself, granted, but even Event Logs can be exported to syslog...

While we're at it, why don't we start using XML or sqlite as a replacement for /etc.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[LordLimecat]

Not quite true. If PHB insists on RHEL, you're stuck coping with whatever poor choices they make.

Package management: use it. I would be very surprised if RedHat prevented you from installing whatever logging facility you wanted on your server.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM

- GameboyRMH (bloody post limiter!)

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Compaqt]

I agree in general with "if it's not broken, don't fix it". Witness /. opinion regarding Unity/Gnome changes.

About Upstart, my lowly sysadmin opinion is this: It seems different from the other stuff Ubuntu's been doing in that, AFAIK, it's not alone in this. I think Fedora's going that way too.

Also, with Upstart I know if the webserver crashes for some reason, it'll restart without intervention. Yeah, I know, you're not getting to the root of the problem, but it beats being stuck to a top display looking if something burned.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Iphtashu Fitz]

RedHat can go their own way without needing the rest of us to buy in

The only problem with your argument is that Red Hat has a huge base of paying customers, and money talks.

I manage a small research cluster at a university. It's running Red Hat linux on over 100 nodes. The university has a site license for Red Hat so licensing for the cluster isn't an issue. The decision to go with Red Hat had to do mainly with what distros are directly supported by commercial products like Matlab, Mathematica, Abaqus, Maple, Comsol, Ansys, etc. All these vendors sell lots of software & services to universities, research labs, etc. and they all support Red Hat linux.

I've personally dealt with support departments when trying to run commercial software on non-RH distros, and in some cases they pretty much tell you you're on your own if you're not using RH or one of the other top two or three distros. Most commercial vendors will only state that they support RedHat, SUSE, and maybe Ubuntu and/or Debian.

If/when Red Hat comes out with a new way of doing things then customers like us will start pushing on the vendors to support those new ways. After all, we're tied into using Red Hat, and we need their products to run on it. So the commercial software vendors will start supporting the Red Hat way of doing things to appease their customers. And once the commercial vendors start supporting it then it will slowly but surely make its way into other distributions as well so that these apps can run on distros that other people want to use.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[LordLimecat]

Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".

One could make that argument about solid-state electronics, the move away from punch-cards, the move from paper-based filing, the move to journaled filesystems, etc.

Sometimes progress means letting go of the past, and sometimes it takes a while to fully bake; thats why RedHat doing the QA, testing, and development for the rest of us is a good thing. If it sucks, it will die, and noone really has to acknowledge that it ever existed.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[rsilvergun]

Yeah, but you add a bunch of overhead to get back to text.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[epiphani]

Agreed. I submitted this post yesterday, by the lead developer for rsyslogd (the most common syslog daemon in linux these days). He makes the point that most of the complaints made are actually wrong if they'd bothered to look at the last 10 years of development and IETF work around syslog.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Crudely_Indecent]

What I don't understand is why you can't achieve both log security and log usefulness with the existing tools.

In a previous job (seems like a different life) - I set up all of the servers to utilize remote syslog. The syslog server then offered the log directory as a read-only NFS exports to each of the servers.

It was quick, it was easy, and it was secure. You could view the local logs on individual servers, but you couldn't alter them in any way except by generating log output.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[DiegoBravo]

Many times with a (semi)broken operating system, you don't have all the usual tools.... sometimes your only clue is a syslog driven console text message.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Hatta]

If it sucks, it will die.

On what do you base this assumption? History is littered with sucky technologies that became standard because someone important was pushing it.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Tomato42]

Just yesterday I was debugging why my syspreped Win 7 images weren't installing properly. So I go to sysprep directory and start reading the text log. It didn't have any useful info. So I grabbed the binary log and tried to import it on the same machine in pre-exec environment. It couldn't do it. So I copied it to different computer and tried to open it there, the system claimed that the file was damaged. After 4 hours of struggle to read, copy or convert the bloody thing I went the "Microsoft recommended way" (seriously, that's the solution they suggest in MSKB) and bisected which program caused the install failure. In "only" 6 reinstalls I finally found the culprit.

If it was a Linux distro, a simple cat or tail would have sufficed and it would have been a 15 minute job, not 2 days. If they want my text logs they will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but you add a bunch of overhead to get back to text.

Yes, you get the overhead when you as a human try to read the log. In plain text you have the overhead whenever it is used by the system.

There are plenty of arguments for using ascii, efficiency is not one of them.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[jgrahn]

Agreed. I submitted this post yesterday, by the lead developer for rsyslogd (the most common syslog daemon in linux these days). He makes the point that most of the complaints made are actually wrong if they'd bothered to look at the last 10 years of development and IETF work around syslog.

But about this part of what he wrote:

"Ages ago (2006?) I implemented high-precision timestamps (including TZ info) in rsyslog, and RFC5424 has brought them to the on-the-wire protocol. As far as I know, syslog-ng supports them for quite a while as well (but I am not a syslog-ng expert ;)). However, all distributions turn high precision timestamps off and set the dumb old format as this is a requirement to keep old tools working."

I enabled high-precision timestamps on my Debian system to get a feel for them. But I had to turn them off again: not readable enough, and took too much screen space making more log lines wrap. The tools weren't the problem; I just couldn't eyeball the damned things!

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[marcosdumay]

Except that logs are rarely used by the system. And on the few times where performance matters, the system is just interested on the last few lines, in real time. So, you just use them before (or while) writting.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[ThePhilips]

The more a system becomes complex, the more one needs to see events as part of a whole and do some kind of analysis and correlation. This type of work is done more easily with databases. I like grep like everyone, but if I want to have a nice rollup of events based on time and source, I will get the info much more easily with a SQL query than with a regex piped into a reporting utility piped into a paging utility.

Typing 'grep <whatever>' is much much faster than: connecting to DB, typing query and realigning rows/columns on screen for readability.

I have to dig quite often through audit-log-like tables in DB created by our software and let me tell you that SQL doesn't make any correlations easy. Especially if we are talking about some production system were you end up self-joining a table with few dozen million rows (what you need to display for example the trivial thing as the time to the next/prev interesting event).

Neither the usual SQL tools are any good at displaying the data - as compared to displaying the SQL itself e.g. syntax highlighting. On text side of things, it takes minutes to create custom syntax for VIM for the problem at hand.

Why would you want to "reconvert" the Windows event log to text?

How many 3rd party applications actually use the Windows Event Log? I have seen probably one or two.

You know why? Because using it is a PITA - I have tried that twice as SW devel already in times of NT4 and W2K. (I was hoping to simplify critical error reporting of the Windows applications (including one GUI-less) and thought myself "WEL is just like syslog!" Oh gosh, Windows API proved me wrong.)

On Windows there is a lot of built-in capabilities for log exploring in Powershell or even in VBS/WMI. A toolbox contains many tools, not just grep.

Oh, so you like all that stuff over something as fool-proof, robust and simple as the grep? OK.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[MightyMartian]

MySQL requires the daemon to be running, or at least access to some utility with the MySQL library. If a system has crashed or has reduced functionality due to system problems, a text log that can be scanned with the basic *nix stdio tools is a helluva lot more useful than a binary log.

I hate the Windows eventlog and binary logs in general precisely because they become rapidly less accessible the more issues a system has, which is quite often why you need to delve into syslog anyways. What exactly is the point to reinventing the wheel?

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[MightyMartian]

So now on top of a crippled system, you've got to move the logs over to a system so you can read them? This is exactly what you're faced with when a Windows system takes a dive, and it sucks.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[cas2000]

yeah, me too. while it's probably better to have the high-precision timestamps, for me it's more useful to have them readable.

I have the same problem with squid logs - they use unix time_t with milliseconds for the timestamp. more precise but less readable. I filter the lines through a small perl script to reformat the dates when i need to tail or process them:

#! /usr/bin/perl -p
use Date::Format ;
s/^\d+\.\d+/time2str("%Y-%m-%d\/%H:%M:%S", $&)/e;

this is similar to what is mentioned in http://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/LogFormat but with the improvement (IMO) that the timestamp still only takes one column (compared to localtime() making it take 5 columns), so it doesn't mess up other processing scripts that depend on the detail being in specific columns)

from this;
1322779413.527
to this:
2011-12-02/09:43:33

It would be annoying to have to do that for syslog logs too. I don't really need millisecond precision for my system logs anyway, near enough is good enough. All i need is accuracy and consistency across multiple systems - and ntp gives me that.

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[bill_mcgonigle]

tail -f /var/log/messages

In mysql? How?

You missed a requirement: in a form that's still usable when the machine keeps going down hard in the middle of a boot. 'tail messages' still works, nothing to get corrupted or worry about a write-ahead log that can't get consistent.

Not that I spent the day today troubleshooting one of those or anything...

Re:One of the advantages of Linux

[mabhatter654]

Wow.. I forget there are OSes that don't have serial panel output for error codes! Or Operator "key" codes to force diagnostic modes?

Coming from an AS400 background this article shows how silly "normal" system management is. To answer the parent, the system can be issued boot time commands in HARDWARE (which are also available for virtual machines) that will bring the system to a minimal "restricted" console state. That's like a cornerstone of the system and IBM doesn't mess with that.

Next, the proposal Red Hat has is a very AS400 concept. The History Log (QHST) and the Security Audit Journal (QAUDJRN) are both binary structures that have hard-coded readers built into the kernel. The system maintains internal integrity of the files with extra fields you never see. Of course the AS400 native file system is "DATABASE"-based. So any command that outputs from these displays to a screen or to something that can be instantly searched with SQL.

I'm certain that is what they are trying to make here. Ultimately in security you care about the integrity of the logs more than even recovering the system... Especially when to don't have to restart for a year at a time or more. Frankly, they should add an output option for SQLite file types and everybody can be happy.

Realize that when places like banks use AS400's they mirror the raw audit journals off to another system, often hundreds a day. Because the are binary journals, they are difficult to tamper with because they interlink with eachother. Yet at the same time because they are a data type programs can monitor them for specific events automatically and it's trivial to set up actions to take.

Avoid binary please!!

[Anonymous Coward]

When everything else is failing ... you still need to be able to dig into the the syslogs reliably no matter what! One little hiccup and you can easily lose everything in most binary type implementations, while at worst you see a little garbage in the syslogs!

Re:Avoid binary please!!

[GameboyRMH]

Or just use a network log server, which is both better from a security standpoint and lets you keep your plaintext logs.

Re:Avoid binary please!!

[RedHat Rocky]

syslog is one of those things that needs to work when things break, so one can figure out what to fix.

Making it more complicated with more things to go wrong goes against this purpose.

Example:
Hmm, database server is acting weird, wonder what's wrong? I'll check syslog. Hmm, syslog is toast. Ah.....

Re:Just more things to break ...

[LordLimecat]

Keep on fragmenting each distro

The whole point of a distro is that it is DIFFERENT from the others around it, not that it is similar. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and the various things they try can be pulled into other projects.

For instance, Canonical has been talking about rolling Wayland in as a replacement for X in Ubuntu. It might be a phenomenal failure, or it might be incredibly successful. If it works well, Im sure RedHat, CentOS, Debian, etc will all pull it in as well, and some bit of progress will have been made. If it sucks and dies, well, that too is progress.

Whining by some guy with a log analyzer

[Animats]

This is just whining by some guy who wrote a log analyzer that will no longer be necessary.

QNX has had a simple structured log daemon for years. Reading their log never tails off into junk; you always get a clean, current last record. Their solution even works on diskless systems. In many real-time applications, logs are transmitted to some remote location, rather than being kept on each local machine.

Re:First post

[pscottdv]

It's almost like there are people reading the article before they post! That way lies madness!!

Re:Is he not aware?

[Nos.]

syslog the application or syslog the protocol? syslog the application? Yes, its past due, and things like rsyslog are much better.

syslog the protocol is fine.

The problem with this proposed replacement is that it does not fix anything. The only advantage it gives is to be able to tell if the logs were altered. That's it. You're far better off with a secondary/centralized logging system. Store your logs in text, compressed, encrypted, in a database, it doesn't matter. Just get them to a different location and then not only can you tell that the originals were altered, you can tell what was removed. All while using existing tools.

That works both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

You will also be stuck with all the good choices they make.

Reading what they are proposing it seems that is actually a very good idea. When you get out of hobbyist and small environments and into environments with more demanding requirements about security auditing the traditional syslog has not cut it for years anymore. The first step in many environments is usually to rip it mostly off and replace with some more or less proprietary environment.

The new ideas such as improving the reliability of log shipping, reducing possibilities towards tampering, and improving chances for more advanced log analysis are really awesome things - especially for people who are serious about their logging. Syslog and its text format are legacy poison and it will be good to see them die and vanish. Hopefully that happens fast.

Also, keep in mind that that RedHat is still open sourcing that stuff. They will provide tools and APIs - as they require those also themselves.

Re:That works both ways

[mlts]

Even though the syslog is in a binary format, it would be nice to have it also stored in text as well. For example, on some sensitive machines, I would have the syslog redirect to an IBM3151 serial terminal for real time monitoring. This way, I could immediately tell if a job started at its appropriate time, finished, or caused issues.

IMHO, the best way RedHat should implement this is similar to how AIX does logging. It has its own format for logs that are read using the errpt command. However, one can turn on plain old syslog logging and have that able to be stored in a file, forwarded to a log server, or shipped via a serial connection to a secure log drop that has no network access. It would be nice to have a signed, secure format for logs, but also nice to have plain text to watch in realtime and search from without requiring specialized commands.

Re:That works both ways

[alcourt]

Actually, I work in security logging in a very large environment. The last thing we permit is ripping out syslog on generic systems. We do send a copy of the logs to a central system, but we don't allow the client systems to be touched.

The central copy cannot be tampered with. The local copy is not for security, but stability and immediate usage.

There is no such thing as a secure local log, and pretending otherwise is shameful. As to reliability, you get to pick between two evils. The possibility of logs not being delivered, or the possibility of logs not being delivered. The more complex the protocol, the more likely it is that a message gets devoured by the system. Simple protocols may not have guaranteed delivery, but their simplicity has actually helped ensure things just Don't Go Wrong.

Re:Are Linux Fans Really About Innovation?

[jd]

Innovation is fine. Invention is better, but if you can't have that then innovation makes a decent replacement. However, Unity isn't really inventive or innovative, and attempting to force someone to use one DWM is definitely a regression.

You are confusing change/novelty with creativity. They're not the same.

And, yes, there SHOULD be push-back. Once it goes past the early adopters, it will make its way to the Real World(tm) where the REAL critics hold multi-million dollar contracts in one hand and a fine sherry in the other. Those critics know nothing about the value of technology, but they know the price of everything, especially that of technology. You WANT the flaws ironed-out before then. You WANT to have put the software not just through the reliability and quality tests but also through the user acceptability tests and the PR tests. You WANT well-tempered systems, honed to damn-well near perfection.

Because, in the end, without those multi-million dollar contracts, the Ubuntus and the Red Hats of the world simply aren't going to bother. There won't be any development at all if we lose the big players at this stage. Linux isn't a garage development project any more, or hadn't you seen the kernel contribution stats on LWN? We NEED the corporations to want to invest not just the time and money they're spending now but more of it. And we won't get that without the PHBs.

Do the PHBs care about Unity or loggers? Directly, no. They care about image and if the unwashed masses turn away from Linux, that's bad image. If there's a security flaw, that's major bad image. If it costs more for the developers to do the same amount of work because of added inefficiencies, especially when the shareholders are baying at the door, that's lethal image. Doesn't matter if Windows would be worse, PHBs won't think like that. Linux is a gamble and it HAS to pay and pay big.