Re: [loganalysis] Re: Central syslog server best practices?

From: Nate Campi (nateat_private)
Date: Mon Aug 13 2001 - 16:50:46 PDT

  • Next message: Andreas Östling: "Re: [loganalysis] Re: Central syslog server best practices?"

    On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 10:55:30AM -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
    > At 05:36 PM 8/12/2001 -0500, Marlys A Nelson wrote:
    > >Andreas Östling wrote:
    > > >
    > > > On Sat, 11 Aug 2001, Marlys A Nelson wrote:
    > > > ...
    > > > > Recently, the log traffic from our firewall (linux running ipchains) has
    > > > > been so heavy that the syslog server has been losing data.
    > > > ...
    > > > > I'm wondering how others configure their syslogging "enterprise-wide" to
    > > > > avoid this problem?
    > > >
    > > > I think it sounds a bit weird that the syslog server is losing data just
    > > > because of one host sending to much information.
    > 
    > Have you considered building a (very small) separate private-IP-space 
    > network for log traffic, and/or making sure that the source and destination 
    > hosts are all on switched ports? It sounds like your limiting factor is 
    > network bandwidth, not disk or processor or RAM.
    > 
    > Have others done this? My interest is partly performance-oriented, partly 
    > security-oriented - I'm a little wary of using crypto-based access control 
    > approaches to logging, because of the potential than an attacker (or an 
    > error) might be able to swamp the related processors with lots of data 
    > needing to be encrypted and signed, leading to a logging DOS due to 
    > processor load.
    
    We've implemented a three-network topology in our newer datacenter
    networks. We have a "front-net" for live internet traffic, a "mid-net" for
    server to server traffic (for database access, multi-tiered apps, etc) and
    a "back-net" for administrative traffic like syslog traffic and pulling
    logs from servers for hit tracking.
    
    I don't think only large shops like ours need such a setup, small shops
    can just as easily overload a 100mbit network wire with inter-server traffic,
    log pulls, syslog traffic, etc. It's a burden from a network
    administration perspective, but all worth it IMHO.
    
    I tend to agree with MJ Ranum, that many of the problems lie with
    standard syslog daemons, and the underlying OS. I use syslog-ng with TCP
    connections to minimize loss of log traffic, so far so good.
    -- 
    Nate Campi  (415) 276-8678  UNIX Ops, Terra Lycos - WiReD SF
    
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