Doug Stewart on 23 Mar 2011 13:29:02 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Is there a better name for...


Logsurfer?

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 4:23 PM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:
> ...a "log check"?
>
> I've talked about this before, there is a package in Debian & Ubuntu, and a
> project site:
> * logcheck - mails anomalies in the system logfiles to the administrator
> * http://logcheck.org/
>
> The idea is simple at a high level and works really well, though there can
> be implementation gotchas.
>
> You take your logs, or output, or whatever and:
> 1) Remove stuff you recognize and don't care about
> 2) Find stuff you *know* is bad, but then remove stuff that only *looks* bad
> 3) Take the remainder
>
> So you end up with 2 buckets:
> A) Stuff you know is bad
> B) Stuff you don't recognize (so either it's bad or you tune it out)
>
> Then over time you tune your patterns (usually regular expressions) to
> reduce "B."
>
> This turns out to be really useful for log monitoring, or handling the
> output from long noisy processes (like compiles that don't set good exit
> codes).
>
> To the best of my knowledge [1], Marcus J. Ranum and Fred Avolio wrote the
> oldest implementation in this context with the 'frequentcheck.sh' script for
> TIS Gauntlet, circa early 1990's.  But it seems like it should be a basic
> sort of "Computer Science" thing, related to filtering or something.  So,
> can anyone think of a better name and/or older example for this process or
> concept?
>
>
> Thanks,
> JP
> ____________________
> Footnote:
> [1] http://logcheck.org/docs/README-psionic
> ----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
> JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
> My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
> ----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
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-- 
-Doug
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
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