Instead, the accepted alternative to Telnet's lack of security is Secure Shell (SSH). Learn how to configure SSH on your Cisco router. David Davis has the details.

Just a suggestion, but have you looked at syslog-ng? It just replaces your normal syslog but to me it seems easier to configure how it handles all the different incoming messages.

Let's start with how to configure SSH on a Cisco IOS router. This configuration process is also very similar on Cisco switches and firewalls.