Speaker Interview: Peter Czanik

Peter Czanik, community manager at BalaBit, makes his SCALE 13x debut, speaking on syslog-ng: from log collecting to log processing and information extraction on SCALE 13x Sunday at 3 p.m. Peter took a few minutes to talk to the SCALE team about the help he provides to distributions to maintain the syslog-ng package, follows bug trackers, and helps users.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: I'm Peter Czanik, community manager at BalaBit, best known in the open source community for syslog-ng. I work with different Linux distributions and FreeBSD to keep syslog-ng and related packages up to date, help syslog-ng users when they get stuck with a problem or need to report a bug. Last, but not least I also advocate syslog-ng and talk about it at conferences, LUG events, and talk as much as I can with syslog-ng users to learn how they use syslog-ng and what they would like to see in syslog-ng next. Before working on syslog-ng I had a similar job at a company creating PowerPC machines. Non x86 architectures are now a free time project for me: I have some PowerPC, ARM and now even a MIPS machine to hack.

Q: You're giving a talk on syslog-ng: from log collecting to log processing and information extraction. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: Logging is the basis to know what is going on in your infrastructure. Massive amount of logs can be difficult to deal with. Parsing log messages can help pinpoint important information easier. Getting started with syslog-ng can seem difficult if someone just looks at the configuration file. I plan to explain the basics of configuring syslog-ng and give the audience a head start in using syslog-ng.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: It's my first visit to SCALE. Many syslog-ng users are in the US and running Linux. This will be my first opportunity to talk to them in person.

[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]