What is imuxsock?

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What is imuxsock some might ask. It is the name of the module that handles Unix Socket Input. For some who might not know, this module manages the delivery of syslog calls from a logging process to rsyslog. The module listens to the log sockets of a Unix system and gives rsyslog the log messages when they occur.

As a module, imuxsock has to be called in the configuration file of rsyslog. The entry looks like this:

$ModLoad imuxsock.so

Because this is the most commonly used module, this entry is in every rsyslog config by default. And because without it, no local logging could work.

The module itself has some options. The default values don’t have to be changed necessarily, because they are pretty balanced. But in some cases this has to be done, like, if a service does separate log socket or when you want to make rate limiting stricter. I won’t give a description to all the options here, because they are documented relatively good in the documentation.

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