Hi John, I guess the whole thing depends on how one would define "human readable". In my view, XML tags and content are still human readable. Binary data could also be counted as human readable if it was preceded with a tag and encoded in base64 etc. Something like [Bin_Data_Base64 = "kahskdjashd=="] would be fine. That way it would be obvious to someone reading the log what part is what.
The idea is to avoid someone trying to send chunks of unencoded binary or hex data over syslog. Syslog was originally intended as a way of alerting operators to system malfunctions or things that required their attention. By tailing the Alert/Warning/Error logs on the console, it was easy to keep an eye on the condition of the systems. Some apps would also send verbose debug information to the logs. This was usually never seen by the operator and simply written to disk for analysis later. Sending XML medical or encoded binary data over syslog would fall into the debug category since no human would be reviewing the logs in real time on the screen. As long as you choose the level and facility (<PRI>) correctly, I feel it would still work fine. That is just my opinion. I'd be interested to hear what others on the list have to say. Cheers Andrew _______________________________________________ Syslog mailing list Syslog@lists.ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/syslog
