By Manny Fernandez

December 7, 2017

Syslog Server running ‘rsyslog’

Although I run FortiSIEM on my home lab, I wanted to have a quick & dirty, low cost, simple solution to just collect logs. I am not a big Windows guy so wanted to keep the bloat off of my lab ESX environment. I deployed my standard CentOS 7 minimal installation (5 min install).

Once installed, I suggest backing up the original rsyslog configuration file located in /etc. The file name is rsyslog.conf

cp /etc/rsyslog.conf /etc/rsyslog.conf.orig

Next we will edit the .conf file leaving the .orig file as a backup in case we “screw the pooch” and have to revert.

vi /etc/rsyslog.conf

If you are not familiar with ‘vi’ you can use nano or your editor of choice. I recommend that you use ‘vi’ since it is available in almost every distro and if you get used to it, you will never feel that lonely feeling of not having your favorite editor. See my blog post “VI Cheat Sheet”

We need to un-comment the UDP support

 

Once you enable UDP, scroll down to the end of the file

In order to have rsyslog create separate folders for each reporting host, you will need to add the following template at the end of the ‘rsyslog.conf’

$template TmplAuth, "/var/log/rsyslog_custom/%HOSTNAME%/%PROGRAMNAME%.log" 
$template TmplMsg, "/var/log/rsyslog_custom/%HOSTNAME%/%PROGRAMNAME%.log" 
authpriv.* ?TmplAuth
*.info,mail.none,authpriv.none,cron.none ?TmplMsg

Now you can restart the rsyslogd service.

To test, I sent a test log from my Synology NAS

Here you can see the contents of the /var/log/rsyslog_custom/LAB-NFS/Sysytem.log​

Hope this helps

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