🟠 High   ⏱ 5–30 min  Last verified: 19 May 2026
Affected versions: FreeBSD 12

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents
  1. Symptom & Impact
  2. Environment & Reproduction
  3. Root Cause Analysis
  4. Quick Triage
  5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
  6. Solution – Primary Fix
  7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
  8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
  9. Rollback Plan
  10. Prevention & Hardening
  11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
  12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Audit and security events are missing during peak load periods.

Environment & Reproduction

Most common with high-rate UDP forwarding.

sockstat -4 -l | grep syslogd

Root Cause Analysis

Kernel socket buffer exhaustion causes dropped datagrams.

Quick Triage

Measure receive drops and forwarding backlog quickly.

netstat -s -p udp | grep -i drop

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Inspect syslogd flags and forwarding destinations.

grep -n syslogd /etc/rc.conf /etc/syslog.conf
Illustrative mockup for freebsd-12 — syslogd_queue_loss
Remote syslog packet loss indicators — Illustrative mockup — Progressive Robot

Solution – Primary Fix

Increase socket buffers and move critical streams to TCP/TLS relay.

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sudo sysrc syslogd_flags='-s -b 127.0.0.1 -vv' && sudo service syslogd restart
Illustrative mockup for freebsd-12 — syslogd_tcp_relay
Switching critical feeds to reliable transport — Illustrative mockup — Progressive Robot

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Deploy dedicated rsyslog/syslog-ng collector for burst handling.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

No sustained receive-drop increase during replay/load tests.

Rollback Plan

Restore prior syslogd flags and forwarding config.

Prevention & Hardening

Use reliable transport and retention-aware log pipeline design.

Can overlap with disk I/O throttling in log storage path.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for freebsd-12.

View all freebsd-12 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

syslogd(8) and production logging architecture references.

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