Syslog via NC or Java doesn't work

[Seine]

I've been trying to get syslogging to work from Java. The log4j syslogappender doesn't seem to work. I checked the implementation and it looked OK. So, I opened up RFC3164 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3164.txt) and re-implemented it in Java. It still didn't work.

So then I tried to use /bin/nc and it still doesn't work. Perhaps I've misread the RFC. Here's what I'm trying.

/usr/bin/logger


# this works
logger -p user.info hello world


/bin/nc


# this doesn't work
echo "<14>May 26 15:23:83 Hello world" > nc -u localhost 514


JVM


// this doesn't work either
// (language is scala)
import java.net._
import java.io._

val ds = new DatagramSocket()
val fullMsg = "<11>May 26 14:47:22 Hello World"
val packet = new DatagramPacket(fullMsg.getBytes("UTF-8"), fullMsg.length, InetAddress.getLocalHost, 514)
ds send packet


Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong?

[The Cog]

The syslog server rsyslogd doesn't listen on the network by default. You must configure this and restart rsyslogd. There is a configuration file /etc/default/rsyslogd that suggests that adding -r might do the trick, but then goes on to say that -r is deprecated. I suspect you may have to change the -c4 to -c3.

See man rsyslog.conf for the v4 configuration options. I haven't read the details but that's probably a better way than using v3 compatibility mode.

Edit:
For all their crowing about how clever and flexible their latest version is, I couldn't find any mention of it being capable of listening on a socket for syslog messages. So I guess that /etc/syslog.conf is useless and you'll have to use the v3 compatibility mode after all.

[Seine]

Thanks for your help. I'm still struggling through this, but I appreciate your info.