# pmlastmsg: last message repeated n times

Module Name: | pmlastmsg
Author: | Rainer Gerhards <rgerhards@adiscon.com>
Available Since: | 5.5.6

## Purpose

Some syslogds are known to emit severity malformed messages with content “last message repeated n times”. These messages can mess up message reception, as they lead to wrong interpretation with the standard RFC3164 parser. Rather than trying to fix this issue in pmrfc3164, we have created a new parser module specifically for these messages. The reason is that some processing overhead is involved in processing these messages (they must be recognized) and we would not like to place this toll on every user but only on those actually in need of the feature. Note that the performance toll is not large – but if you expect a very high message rate with tenthousands of messages per second, you will notice a difference.

This module should be loaded first inside rsyslog’s parser chain. It processes all those messages that contain a PRI, then none or some spaces and then the exact text (case-insensitive) “last message repeated n times” where n must be an integer. All other messages are left untouched.

## Configuration Parameters

Note

Parameter names are case-insensitive.

There do not currently exist any configuration parameters for this module.

## Examples

### Systems emitting malformed “repeated msg” messages

This example is the typical use case, where some systems emit malformed “repeated msg” messages. Other than that, the default RFC 5424 and RFC 3164 parsers should be used. Note that when a parser is specified, the default parser chain is removed, so we need to specify all three parsers. We use this together with the default ruleset.

    module(load="pmlastmsg")

    parser(type="pmlastmsg" name="custom.pmlastmsg")

    ruleset(name="ruleset" parser=["custom.pmlastmsg", "rsyslog.rfc5424",
                                   "rsyslog.rfc3164"]) {
         ... do processing here ...
    }

See also

Help with configuring/using `Rsyslog`:

- Mailing list - best route for general questions

- GitHub: rsyslog source project - detailed questions, reporting issues that are believed to be bugs with `Rsyslog`

- Stack Exchange (View, Ask) - experimental support from rsyslog community

See also

Contributing to `Rsyslog`:

- Source project: rsyslog project README.

- Documentation: rsyslog-doc project README

Copyright 2008-2020 Rainer Gerhards (Großrinderfeld), and Others.