Ubuntu 12.04 logger won't write to remote syslog

Question

I've already posted this question to Server Fault and it was upvoted twice as a respectable question, but unfortunately it has been crickets as far as an answer so I'm taking a shot at posting it here since this forum seems very active. If there are any other suggestions for sites where someone might be able to help me, I'd appreciate that too.

I'm trying to use logger to send events to a remote syslog server. The syslog server is Ubuntu 12.04 running the default rsyslogd. The "client" servers are both Ubuntu 12.04 and SLES11SP1. On SLES11, I can send events to the syslog server successfully. Tcpdump shows them successfully being sent from the SLES client:

CEIDMLDAP-LS02:~ # tcpdump udp -n dst portrange 514
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
11:07:58.865116 IP 10.192.0.108.34249 > 10.192.3.104.514: SYSLOG user.notice, length: 59
11:09:07.921309 IP 10.192.0.108.34249 > 10.192.3.104.514: SYSLOG user.notice, length: 77

On the Ubuntu syslog server tcpdump also shows them being received and they show up in /var/log/messages there. However, I can't get logger to send anything from the Ubuntu 12.04 clients even though logger on that OS has a special switch for designating the remote server. I've tried many variations of the command line:

logger -n <ip> Message
logger -n <ip> -d -P 514 Message
etc

None of these efforts are shown by tcpdump as even leaving the client server. They simply never seem to happen at all.

I'm running logger from a sudo su shell. Interestingly when I simply use logger to send a message to the local syslog, it seems to record it as from my account, but when I send remote, it records it as from logger. This may be normal, but I include it for detail.

I'm really hoping that I'm missing something obvious like a dependent package that I haven't installed, but I haven't been able to discover it yet. If not that, does anyone have any ideas how I could get this working?

Answer 1

Just spent about 40 minuets trying to figure what's wrong with logger on debian, just like you. Luckily, i've found workaround.

Here it is: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=684264