I just wanted to point out that there's a patch for sysklogd that makes it possible to run syslogd/klogd as non root user. The patch was made by Chris Wing and (I found) it from: http://eltopo.engin.umich.edu/caenlinux/6.1/SRPMS/ (it's in the sysklog srpm). -Jarno
*** Bug 17758 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Owl Linux also has patches for klogd / syslogd to run as unprivileged users. http://www.openwall.com/Owl/
Just clearing out old bugs here. The patches in question merely provide a command-line argument to set the userid ; this could also be acheived with changing the ownership of the executables and making them setuid. The more complex issues arise with changing everything else (eg. logrotate) to take account of non-root owners of log files. Also it would have problems listening on the reserved syslog port. As such, I think this change is unlikely to be required.