iptables not logging to syslog

I was scratching my head on this one for several hours before finally figuring out the solution which turned out to be ridiculously simple.

I wanted to log all incoming tcp connections on port 25 and then drop them. I read through several guides on how to set up logging in iptables. (linuxgurus.com, linuxquestions.org)

Seemed straightforward enough. Here are the rules I ended up with: (output from iptables-save)

-A LOGDROP -p tcp -m limit --limit 2/sec --limit-burst 10 -j LOG --log-level 7 --log-prefix "LOGDROP: "
-A LOGDROP -j REJECT
...
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 25 -j LOGDROP

Any tcp connections to port 25 should get logged and rejected. You then need to decide what to do with the logged packets, which is where /etc/syslog.conf comes in. You need something like this in /etc/syslog.conf:

kern.=debug     /var/log/firewall

Note that there must be no spaces, only tabs in that line. That line tells any kernel messages that have the “debug” level to be written to the file /var/log/firewall. The –log-prefix 7 part of the iptables rule tells iptables to set the level of the message to “debug”. After changing syslog.conf, you need to restart the syslog daemon, with /etc/init.d/syslog restart:

[root@localhost ~]# /etc/init.d/syslog restart
Shutting down kernel logger:                               [PASSED]
Shutting down system logger:                               [  OK  ]
Starting system logger:                                    [  OK  ]
Starting kernel logger:                                    [PASSED]

I hadn’t seen [PASSED] show up there before, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.

The problem I was having was that there was nothing in the log file. I could see the packets being logged by running dmesg, but nothing went to the file.

I opened up syslog’s startup script, /etc/init.d/syslog, and examined the part where it is supposed to start klogd, the kernel logger. It was commented out, apparently by my vps host. Here is a snippet of my startup script. The bold lines are the ones I added, the commented out ones are what was originally there

start() {
        echo -n $"Starting system logger: "
        daemon syslogd $SYSLOGD_OPTIONS
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        echo -n $"Starting kernel logger: "
        #passed klogd skipped #daemon klogd $KLOGD_OPTIONS
        <b>daemon klogd $KLOGD_OPTIONS</b>
        echo
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/syslog
        return $RETVAL
}
stop() {
        echo -n $"Shutting down kernel logger: "
        #passed klogd skipped #killproc klogd
        <b>killproc klogd</b>
        echo
        echo -n $"Shutting down system logger: "
        killproc syslogd
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/syslog
        return $RETVAL
}

According to some people here, it is not necessary to log kernel messages, and it significantly increases the loadavg. I have already been monitoring my loadavgs on my servers, so I’ll wait a week and see if there is any significant change.

Of course, now that I realize klogd wasn’t even started, this whole thing seems pretty silly.