the nullest blog

I recently installed the ssh daemon on cygwin and it works very well. However, by default to the windows event log. This annoyed me. By doing some google/Internet research I found out that this could be “solved” by starting the ssh daemon with the command line flag “-e” which tells sshd to log all error messages to stderr. Fair enough, the messages turned up in /var/log/sshd.log. But without the date wasn’t logged. This annoyed me even more. Infact, i didn’t want to send the log messages to stderr but I didn’t want them to be directed to the windows log niether.

By doing some more internet research I found out that the deamon syslog-ng could be installed for cygwin. I gave it a shot. You’ll find it in the Admin category in the Cygwin setup:

Once the setup has finished you can install the syslog-ng daemon by typing:

/usr/bin/syslog-ng-config

and answer yes to all questions (or no if you should disagree on something)
Before starting the daemon you might have to edit the file /etc/syslog-ng.conf.
The following configuration file worked for me:

options {
keep_hostname(yes);
chain_hostnames(no);
owner("system");
group("root");
perm(0664);
sync(0);
};source applications {
unix-dgram("/dev/log");
internal();
};

source kernel {
file("/dev/kmsg", log_prefix("kernel: "));
};

destination messages {
file("/var/log/messages");
};

destination sshd { file("/var/log/sshd.log"); };

filter f_sshd { program(sshd); };

log { source(applications); filter(f_sshd); destination(sshd); };

log {
source(applications);
destination(messages);
};

log {
source(kernel);
destination(messages);
};

I experienced some problem with the arrow keys on Cygwin. In insert mode, pressing the arrow keys just inserted a new line and some random character (which probably wasn’t random but had some meaning - anyway,  that character  didn’t say anything to me). Furthermore, the tab didn’t work as I was used to in the Windows version of VIM. More precisely, I couldn’t use tab completion on commands in command line mode (I think shift-Tab worked though, but this is much too unorthodox for me). So, what’s this all about? Well, the problem could easily be rectified by copying an example .vimrc file to my home directory:

cp /usr/share/vim/vim71/vimrc_example.vim ~/.vimrc

The problem disappeared.