Dropping privileges in rsyslog

Available since:    4.1.1

Description:

Rsyslogd provides the ability to drop privileges by impersonating as another user and/or group after startup.

Please note that due to POSIX standards, rsyslogd always needs to start up as root if there is a listener who must bind to a network port below 1024. For example, the UDP listener usually needs to listen to 514 and as such rsyslogd needs to start up as root.

If you do not need this functionality, you can start rsyslog directly as an ordinary user. That is probably the safest way of operations. However, if a startup as root is required, you can use the $PrivDropToGroup and $PrivDropToUser config directives to specify a group and/or user that rsyslogd should drop to after initialization. Once this happend, the daemon runs without high privileges (depending, of course, on the permissions of the user account you specified).

There is some additional information available in the rsyslog wiki.

Configuration Directives:

[rsyslog.conf overview] [manual index] [rsyslog site]

This documentation is part of the rsyslog project.
Copyright © 2008 by Rainer Gerhards and Adiscon. Released under the GNU GPL version 3 or higher.