Last time I mentioned that I was working on a central syslog. Part of the task was also possibility to easily go through the logs, preferably with some filtering and what not. ELK-stack is usually the first thing mentioned as a potential solution. Essentially the goal is to land your logs in Elasticsearch. The problem with both of these solutions is on the processing part. With Logstash things can go very wrong very quickly and there’s only handful of other things than _grokparsefailure that can seriously put me into rage mode.

Read more “Rsyslog to Elasticsearch”

Recently I’ve been tasked with creating a central syslog server. These are very useful when one maintain couple of boxes (or couple hundred and more) as it can provide a single point of checking out on what’s up with the machines. If it’s combined properly with metrics it serves as a super-boosting way of maintaining the overview of the entire infrastructure.

When it comes to NGINX, it defaults to storing log files in plain text. It’s a sane default and I don’t see a good reason to ship it in any other fashion. However, sometimes the needs change. It was the case for me — I’m using rsyslog¹ for all of the OS logs and it felt natural to me to have NGINX invited to join the party. As rsyslog client is pushing all of its logs further to the centralized server part already, I wanted to have NGINX logs included in the stream.

Read more “NGINX logging to syslog”

After seven years of maintaining PPA with custom packages for Debian, I now decided to finally drop and close it. I no longer use Debian as my main Linux distribution hence I have no need nor interest in providing any builds for it.

That being said, I also decided to pack the whole repo as is for anyone willing to either pick it up or to simply have a look on how this was done for the last few years.

I also need to give the credit where the credit is due — Julien’s Valroff’s tutorial titled Build i386 packages on amd64 brought me into world of proper Debian package building. I’m not even sure how old it is, but it’s still valid today.

As far as it comes to the software stack, the only thing I changed not long ago was finally the switch git-buildpackage. All the rest is the same — cowbuilder, pbuilder, quilt, gpg, reprepro and simple nginx in front.

Package with the repo contents can be found on the PPAs website. It was fun and useful for the time being, thanks for the ride!