I'm running beaver v29 on Debian 6.0 and python v 2.6.6.

beaver.conf

[beaver]
transport: redis
redis_url: redis://logger.monitor.vpn:6379/0
redis_namespace: logstash:redis
format: json

[/var/log/activity.log]
tags: srv_activity.log
[/var/log/mail.log]
tags: srv_mail.log
[/var/log/syslog]
tags: srv_syslog
[/var/log/daemon.log]
tags: srv_daemon.log
[/var/log/auth.log]
tags: srv_auth.log

Beaver abruptly quits on the server after logging the below info:

[2013-06-18 07:43:34,185] DEBUG Last update time now 1371555814
[2013-06-18 07:43:34,220] DEBUG Last update time now 1371555814
[2013-06-18 07:43:34,230] DEBUG Last update time now 1371555814
[2013-06-18 07:43:39,249] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:43:44,254] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:43:49,258] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:43:54,264] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:43:59,266] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:04,272] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:09,277] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:14,283] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:19,286] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:24,292] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:29,297] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:34,303] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:39,308] DEBUG No data
[2013-06-18 07:44:39,309] INFO Queue timeout of "60" seconds exceeded, stopping queue

All the log-files monitored had continuous data activity before and after the timestamp of 2013-06-18 07:43:39 without a gap of even 10 seconds.

Additionally a failure to detect the encoding of a file was also logged when beaver was started:

[2013-06-18 06:31:34,606] DEBUG [ca08gca001] - getting start position /var/log/activity.log
[2013-06-18 06:31:34,606] DEBUG [ca08gca001] - getting end position for /var/log/activity.log
[2013-06-18 06:31:34,809] DEBUG [ca08gca001] - UnicodeDecodeError raised for /var/log/activity.log with encoding utf_8
[2013-06-18 06:31:34,979] DEBUG [ca08gca001] - UnicodeDecodeError raised for /var/log/activity.log with encoding windows-1252

"file -i /var/log/activity.log" gives "text/plain; charset=us-ascii" as the encoding.
However 'UnicodeDecodeError' doesn't seem to be the reason for abrupt stop for me since it was happily logging even after this error came up. I do not justify this hunch, just thinking out loud. Beaver quit only after 'No data' was showing up.

Please let me know if you'd need any info.

Thanks,