On 12/24/05, Scott Henson <<a href="mailto:scotth@csee.wvu.edu">scotth@csee.wvu.edu</a>> wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Lukas Sabota wrote: >> > There needs to be some easy way of alerting the administrator of some > things that have been done using mail: > Failed login attemps (remote and local) > Failed backups > Important cron scripts failing. > I think there is a point where people are missing eachother at.  Things like the above would most likely be seen on a server using server type software that doesn't have a GUI and normal desktop users are not likely to see.  For the most part, the failed login attempts that your going to worry about(if your not paranoid and not living/working with people you don't trust) are those for remote services, and since Ubuntu doesn't have any of those by default the standard home user isn't going to need to worry about this. </blockquote></div> I'll take a step back while trying to keep things simple and on perspective. The 'Unix way' involves lots fo text files, and the logging system is no exception. The mail system is also text-based, and it worked fine (until now it seems). Errors on a Unix system have been successfully reported via log files and/or email for decades. This is Good (tm). The 'Unix way' is great for servers for lots of reasons. It allows information to be stored in a readily readable way; it's chronologically ordered; and it just works, because it depends very little on some obscure, advanced or ill documented piece of software. But today Linux is going mainstream, and clean text files do not cut it anymore. Before we start to rip another page from the Windows handbook and implement a lot of cute notifiers that do little to actually help things get done, lets think about the real issues. The log system is fine as it is. It centralizes the storage of all system reporting stuff. What is missing is a clean, understable, and uniform system for conveying that information to users that does not involve either sendmail or 'tail -f <somelogfile>'. By the way I think reporting by mail is fine, as long as it allows the user to actually receive the relevant messages in their primary mail accounts and not on the root account of the box they're supposed to be 'managing', but I digress. Now, if each and every subsystem in a Unix/Linux box decides to implement its own reporting system, we would soon end in a nightmare situation. Now, instead of ripping a page from Windows (which manages not to be consistent on this, and also not to have a good memory on what-ever-happened-to-this-box), why not rip it from Unix itself? The log system is just fine. What is needed is a high-level abstraction over the log system - some tool that could convert log lines into notifications, and keep track about whether people actually readed the notifications or not, etc. In short: let's the log system do what it does well, that is to provide a clean and uniform interface for software to report on events. Just build on top of it. Let's build a graphical interface that does more than implement a text-file viewer; let's implement some intelligence into it, in such a way it can group and report related events, even if they come from several independent sources. It could even mail reports about the system... but do it in such a way that would give a chance to the system admin (or box owner) to choose how to do it, and configure it properly. Of course, things are not that easy. 'cron' is a special case, and I'm not sure if it can be handled nicely. One idea: instead of sending email, cron could log stuff via syslog. Regular script output would kill the log structure (think /var/log/messages with long messages inserted), but a separate logfile could take care of it. I think it's feasible but let's see... Well, that was my annual Xmas rant :-) Let's hope the New Years Day is a more inspired one... -- Carlos Ribeiro Consultoria em Projetos blog: <a href="http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com">http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com</a> blog: <a href="http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com">http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com </a> mail: <a href="mailto:carribeiro@gmail.com">carribeiro@gmail.com</a> mail: <a href="mailto:carribeiro@yahoo.com">carribeiro@yahoo.com</a>