Fixing Homebrew’s rsyslog on macOS Catalina

As part of some recent testing, I needed to install rsyslog and the instructions I had referenced using Homebrew to do it. I used the following procedure to do it:

1. Set up a new VM running macOS 10.15.3 in VMware Fusion.

2. Inside the VM, open Terminal and install Homebrew by running the following command:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

3. Once Homebrew was installed, install rsyslog by running the following command:

brew install rsyslog

4. Copy a pre-configured rsyslog.conf file to /usr/local/etc/rsyslog.conf.

5. Set the following permissions on /usr/local/etc/rsyslog.conf:

File permissions

Owner: root - read, write
Group: wheel - read
Everyone: read

6. Start rsyslog by running the following command with root privileges:

brew services start rsyslog

When I checked on rsyslog though, it wasn’t running or accepting logs from remote Macs like it should be. What had happened?

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Update – 3-5-2020: The problem described by this post has now been fixed:

Fix has been merged. 🎉

— Jon 🌈🍄 (@neophit) March 5, 2020

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For more details, please see below the jump.

Backing up a Jamf Pro database hosted in Amazon Web Services’ RDS service to an S3 bucket

For those using Amazon Web Services to host Jamf Pro, one of the issues you may run into is how to get backups of your Jamf Pro database which you can access. AWS’s RDS service makes backups of your database to S3, but you don’t get direct access to the S3 bucket where they’re stored.

In the event that you want a backup that you can access of your RDS-hosted MySQL database, Amazon provides the option for exporting a database snapshot to an S3 bucket in your AWS account. This process will export your data in Apache Parquet format instead of a MySQL database export file.

However, it’s also possible to create and use an EC2 instance to perform the following tasks:

1. Connect to your RDS-hosted MySQL database.
2. Create a backup of your MySQL database using the mysqldump tool.
3. Store the backup in an S3 bucket of your choosing.

For more details, please see below the jump.