Syslog-NG

Update 2020-07-09: With the latest 19.07.3, syslog-ng is no longer the preferred option. Instead, read my other article on using rsyslog with OpenWRT.

Update 2014-10-08: If you upgraded to the stable Barrier Breaker 14.07, and Syslog-NG is not available, or if don't want to use Syslog-NG for any other reason, please check our other article on using the built in logging feature of OpenWRT to write the log to a file.

We wrote earlier on OpenWRT on D-Link DIR-835. Now, we need to expand the functionality a bit more.

On OpenWRT, the default logging mechanism is an in-memory circular buffer. The user interface for it is the logread command. The log buffer default size is 16 kB. There are a couple of directives that can be set in the system configuration for OpenWRT, but because of the limited size of flash and the non-permanence of RAM, you need another solution if you want to store logs for anything longer than a day or two.

Syslog-NG

Syslog-NG is a good system logging program that is available for OpenWRT.