While I have been in Tallinn to give some lectures about syslog technology in general as well as rsyslog in specific I had the idea to use that opportunity to think about crafting rsyslog tutorials in general.
For the practical session at TALTECH IT-College I have identified a couple of typical configuration tasks. As experience shows, to carry them out successfully not only rsyslog knowledge is required but general sysadmin know-how as well.
The idea is now to write some postings on these configuration tasks. I first thought about rolling them into the regular rsyslog documentation. Right now I have decided against this: a problem we see with the documentation is that it is mirrored by many web sites. This is great and grants easy access. Unfortunately, though, “some” of these sites pick the doc only once and never update it. This yields to, well, sub-optimal experience for users.
The tutorials I have on my mind are something that will hopefully undergo some revisions to become really useful. Having sites who potentially mirror old stuff sounds scary for this effort. Also, it is not yet sure how much effort it will finally be. So I cannot guarantee to maintain it continuously (albeit I plan to). This is yet another reason I would not like to include it into the official doc. As a side-effect I may more liberally experiment with things like YouTube videos.
As such, the plan is to do the work, at least in the beginning, here on my personal site. Maybe later migrate it to the rsyslog project site. And even later to the doc? Who knows…
In any case, you now know what is going on. Expect the first tutorial soon. Feedback is highly appreciated. Both on this topic here as well as on the individual tutorial pages.