sysklogd: running multiple instances

I'm frustrated by the hard-coded and unchangeable aspects of sysklogd
configuration. I really want to use syslogd to listen for messages
logged over the network from a set of systems, but I want to run it as a
non-root user, with a different config file, and I don't want it to
interfere with the normal system logging (this second syslogd would not
read the normal /dev/log socket; that would be left to the standard
syslog).

For example, I cannot start a second syslogd that listens on a different
UDP port, because there's no command line option (or config option) to
change the port. It can only use the single value defined
in /etc/services.

Even if I ignore this problem, I can't start a second syslogd because
there's a static, unconfigurable pathname to store the syslogd PID file,
and if that file cannot be used then syslogd simply exits.

There may be more problems but this is where I'm stuck right now.

There are other things that would be nice such as restricting incoming
network logging to a specific network interface, although similar things
can be achieved (with more configuration effort) via ipchains I suppose.

Is there a reason for these restrictions that I don't see? Or is this
just a use-case that has not been considered before? Is it a use-case
that holds any interest for the sysklogd maintainers? Naively, it
doesn't seem like it would be much of a problem to provide this
flexibility.
Received on Wed Jan 21 2009 - 19:17:07 CET