On 09/02/2016 04:21 AM, Daniel Bauer wrote:
would syslog-ng give me a textfile like /var/log/messages that I can just look at from time to time?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that (a) it depends what you mean by "like", and (b) how willing you are to spend time learning, RTFM, reading how-to articles, to get syslog-ng to sing and dance the way you want. Maybe, just maybe, your expectations are low. In which case you want care that it can do things that you've never considered before and what may be of great benefit to you, automation your work and so forth in ways you never dreamt of. Who knows? In the dim mists of times long past one of the most useful programs to me as a pupal sysadmin was a tool called 'swatch'. This was long before the Swiss watch company of that name with the colourful bands. It was a Perl script that watched the output of the old, vanilla, under-equipped syslog. It could be configured to watch for any event or series of events occurring in a time period or sequence and notify you by email, writing to your console or even LO! by sending a message to your pager. This was in the days before cell phones and SMS. When they came along there was an upgrade for SMS :-) It even had what Marcus Ranum termed 'artificial ignorance' - it could ignore the stuff you deemed 'noise'. And lets face it, if you knew Perl you knew that its scanners and RE matching was so much better than the shell and grep! And faster and ... well, just Better! But now its irrelevant. There's syslog and there's syslog-ng. If you aren't interested in what syslog-ng can do that makes things like swatch irrelevant because syslog-ng can be configured to do it all, then stick with the vanilla 'syslog'. Why am I saying this? Regular readers will recall that I'm into amateur (that is, I don't get paid for it, no matter the quality) photography. I have been since my mid teens. I've owned many cameras; I've followed their technological evolution. I've been using SLRs for longer than I've been using *NIX. Sometimes I'm out and about and I meet professionals and discuss technique; yes they have good, often leading edge equipment, but that's incidental - being professionals they (a) need it and (b) can pay for it as a business expense. But we talk technique not technology. Then I meet the people with more money than sense. They buy expensive, complicated cameras and clearly don't know how to configure them - heck that might involve reading the manual and that's not !FUN! If you do talk to them they speak of the cost of their equipment and how great it is and how its so much better than my ("antiquated") stuff, how many meagpixels they have, how many lenses they have. I try not to deal with these people. All they have is very very expensive, very overpowered point-and-shoot. If all you need is the basic "point and sheet' level of technology then don't get something more complicated, more complex, more configurable than you need unless you are willing to invest in learning about it and making use of its capability. It will be a frustration for you. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org