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Being a maintainer of a secure syslog implementation around 2001, I was asked to join the IETF syslog group. There were a couple of syslog-ng guys, a Cisco guy
by alecco 5y ago
Being a maintainer of a secure syslog implementation around
2001, I was asked to join the IETF syslog group. There were a couple of syslog-ng guys, a Cisco guy, and I think a Microsoft guy. Plus a couple of randoms that didn't participate. The Cisco/Microsoft guys there looked like people whose sole job was to sit on standard comitees. They were not developers, at least not as a day job.
I was trying to reach a compromise in a simple syslog standard so it would be easier to authenticate and analyze. And trying to make it good enough for non-*nix systems. Nobody else cared about this.
It was one of the worst time wasters in my life. It was all politics. The syslog-ng guys were adamant with their proposal which was a very, very over-complicated idea based on another standard (BEEP). And I strongly suspect the Cisco/Microsoft guys were intentionally trying to make the group not work in subtle ways. After months, I just left.
They eventually published RFC 3195. And it's barely used, of course.
It seems Cisco's implementation still uses DIGEST-MD5 for authentication.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoSorry you had to go through that, but standards bodies are literally political bodies. That's why the commercial representatives are not devs. They are there to advocate for their own constituents, not help others. The Cisco/Microsoft guys just wanted to make sure nobody would break their products, and that their products would work with other things. That generally means changing as little as possible, which can definitely look like "not working".