Chained Syslog forwarding

Personally I would recommend using syslog-ng for your internal server - it provides a whole lot more than rsyslog. Of specific interest in your case it provides some much better handling for managing / rewriting / etc for the hostnames.

If you decide to stick with rsyslog this configuration does preserve both the remote and local hostnames - it is what I used before switching to syslog-ng.

$ModLoad imuxsock.so
$ModLoad imklog.so      
$ModLoad imudp.so
$UDPServerRun 514
$ActionFileDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG_TraditionalFileFormat
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none                /var/log/messages
authpriv.*                                              /var/log/secure
mail.*                                                  -/var/log/maillog
cron.*                                                  /var/log/cron
*.emerg                                                 *
uucp,news.crit                                          /var/log/spooler
local7.*                                                /var/log/boot.log

I also was using the "-c 4" options in my init script, if it matters.

Problem was tcpwrappers which was obvious once I set up a test syslog-ng instance and ran it with debug output turned on. Adding the following clause to /etc/hosts.allow did the trick

syslog-ng: 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0

Also realised that we didn't handle syslog-ng's internal messages (which may well have told us what the problem was). Have now added the following lines to do this ...

# Deal with syslog-ng's own messages
source s_internal { internal(); };
destination d_internal {file("/var/log/syslog-ng.log"); };
log { source(s_internal); destination(d_internal); };