# Free Services for Rsyslog

A personal word from Rainer, the lead developer of rsyslog:

The rsyslog community provides ample free support resources. Please see our troubleshooting guide to get started.

Every now and then I receive private mail with support questions. I appreciate any feedback, but I must limit my resources so that I can help driver a great logging system forward.

To do so, I have decided not to reply to unsolicited support emails, at least not with a solution (but rather a link to this page ;)). I hope this does not offend you. The reason is quite simple: If I do personal support, you gain some advantage without contributing something back. Think about it: if you ask your question on the public forum or mailing list, other with the same problem can you and, most importantly, even years later find your post (and the answer) and get the problem solved. So by solving your issue in public, you help create a great community resource and also help your fellow users finding solutions quicker. In the long term, this also contributes to improved code because the more questions users can find solutions to themselves, the fewer I need to look at.

But it comes even better: the rsyslog community is much broader than Rainer ;) - there are helpful other members hanging around at the public places. They often answer questions, so that I do not need to look at them (btw, once again a big "thank you", folks!). And, more important, those folks have different background than me. So they often either know better how to solve your problem (e.g. because it is distro-specific) or they know how to better phrase it (after all, I like abstract terms and concepts ;)). So you do yourself a favor if you use the public places.

An excellent place to go to is the rsyslog forum inside the knowledge base (which in itself is a great place to visit!). For those used to mailing lists, the rsyslog mailing list also offers excellent advise.

Don't like to post your question in a public place? Well, then you should consider purchasing rsyslog professional support. The fees are very low and help fund the project. If you use rsyslog seriously inside a corporate environment, there is no excuse for not getting one of the support packages ;)

Of course, things are different when I ask you to mail me privately. I'll usually do that when I think it makes sense, for example when we exchange debug logs.

I hope you now understand the free support options and the reasoning for them. I hope I haven't offended you with my words - this is not my intension. I just needed to make clear why there are some limits on my responsiveness. Happy logging!

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This documentation is part of the rsyslog project.
Copyright © 2008 by Rainer Gerhards and Adiscon. Released under the GNU GPL version 3 or higher.