It has been sometime since I was able to get back into looking at this issue. I took sometime this morning to start trouble shooting again and found out what was causing the problem. This code was written when RHEL used syslogd and in version RHEL 6 they changed it to rsyslogd. So I edited the rsyslog.conf file to reflect the usage of the fifo and everything works as it should with the system alerting on the predefined error phrases. One change is that syslogd accepted the | symbol but rsyslogd does not. See the code change.

This is the old code with using the syslog.conf

This is how it needs to be set using rsyslog.conf

Since I was able to resolve the issue I wanted to let you all know how in case someone wanted to use the code on their server. Thanks again for those that helped out!