> There are good reasons IMHO for writing a small networked C server doing this
Right, because:
https://github.com/cloudera/flume
https://github.com/facebook/scribe/wiki
http://sna-projects.com/kafka/
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=syslogd&sektion...
... don't exist?
(Formulation courtesy of abhay, plug for Kafka mine)