Most people consider sudo and syslog-ng as old, small and stable utilities. Yes, they are from the ‘90s, but both are constantly evolving, gaining many interesting new features along the way. Peter, who is an evangelist for these two applications, shows you some of the most interesting new developments in both projects. By default, only basic functionality is enabled in FreeBSD ports, so we will also take a look at some of the extra features you can enable if you compile the packages yourself.
On the syslog-ng side most people know that it can save incoming log messages to text files, and few are aware of the complete set of features this tool has. Syslog-ng has four major roles: collecting log messages, processing, filtering and storing them. There are many supported log sources and you can write your own in Python. Or another example: it can find credit card numbers in logs and remove them to comply with PCI-DSS. And syslog-ng can store logs not just to text files, but to databases, big data destinations, like Hadoop, or to Splunk or Elasticsearch as well. Sudo is mostly known as a prefix for administrative commands. Did you know that you can also record sessions, extend sudo with Python scripts and even analyze what is happening on the screen? Learn which of the above mentioned features are supported in FreeBSD ports (hint: all of them), which are enabled by default, and which features require you to recompile sudo or syslog-ng.
Speakers: Peter Czanik