> possibility to specify a kind of "simple reliable syslog protocol".
I second the idea of a new simple reliable protocol. It needs to be very easily implemented, flexible, easy to parse and check for accuracy and use standard "off the shelf" components. Mostly, it needs to be simple if we ever expect hardware manufactures to adopt it. If a simple standard was proposed and agreed upon, would any of you implement it in preference to the current RFC? Some things that spring to mind that need fixing are... Timestamp needs to include time, date and time zone. Maybe even a millisecond count. A consistent delimiter or message length field needs to be added to ensure messages can be extracted from the TCP stream in the correct manner. It is not always possible to use the TCP Push flag on all Oses (eg. Winsock). A consistent set of header fields in a consistent order needs to be defined. Maybe the option for block hashing Plain TCP socket, or wrapped in SSH or SSL. I have some ideas on how to implement the above, if anyone is interested in hearing them, let me know. Cheers Andrew