[hobbit] Messages file not reporting

Fri Feb 3 17:21:04 CET 2006

One thing to watch out for would be multi-line log messages.  I don't know
about Linux, but Solaris certainly reports some device messages with WARNING
or ERROR on the first line, and the actual device on the next line with more
information.  Where I work, the jokers that set up CA Unicenter made it
detect WARNING & ERROR  and had the agent send "Disk error" messages to the
console, and never mind that the device was /dev/st0 (scsi *tape*) and it
just wanted cleaning, or a fresh tape...

I seem to recall that the second and subsequent lines were indented a couple
of spaces.  Kinda like Linux seems to do, such as in the lines right after:

   BIOS-provided physical RAM map:

and several other places in the boot messages.

Ralph Mitchell

On 2/3/06, Edward Croft <ecroft at openratings.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, Linux based. I will  have to look into what you are doing. I am
> wondering if maybe a grep on the log file with the expression "WARNING"
> would return only those warnings. Then bump up against the timestamp to see
> if it is old. Beyond an hour, ignore it. This would give me the alert and
> then I could shut it off and it would go past the time stamp. Big Brother
> gave you a file to show for each machine what you were looking to alert on.
> Thanks for giving me a direction to go.
>
> On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 08:41 -0500, Allan.Marillier at dana.com wrote:
>
>
> Hi Edward - I understand your frustration - I've been through the same
> things myself, and also initially not found the FAQ indicating that syslog
> monitoring is not yet supported. I believe that Henrik is making it a
> priority since so many of us are asking for it but there is no news yet or
> commitment from him on when it will be available.
>
> I searched deadcat.net and didn't find anything that looked worth using to
> me, but I may have missed it. One thing I have been working on, but I've had
> a few problems, is writing a custom extension. The extension itself is very
> easy to do - e.g. I have written two for my Linux servers, one to run some
> sql code to attach to an Oracle instance and report green if it is up or red
> if it is down, and another to check LAN adapter settings and turn yellow if
> it is not set to 100Mb full duplex. I have been working on a syslog monitor
> which looks at /var/log/messages, checks the inode to be sure logrotate has
> not run, and then uses tail to parse the last n lines. I determine n by
> checking how many lines are in the file with wc and recording that to a file
> on disk, then later come back and do the same again. If the inode is the
> same, and wc -l returned 1000 but now returns 1057, then I do tail -n 57
> /var/log/messages | grep -i error and look for any problems.
>
> The problem I've encountered is that sometimes the inode changes. Yes, it
> really does and I'm not crazy, give it a try on Linux. Copy
> /var/log/messages, then ls -al -i the copy. Edit it with vi, even if all you
> do is open, then write and quit with no actual changes, and more often than
> not, the inode will change. I don't understand it. If I can get this working
> I'd be happy to share my custom extension with you - or maybe you will have
> some ideas on a different and more robust approach.
>
> I'm assuming of course that you're Unix/Linux based, which is not always a
> good assumption!
>
>
>
>
>   *Edward Croft <ecroft at openratings.com>*
>
> 02/02/2006 05:16 PM
>   Please respond to
>
> hobbit at hswn.dk
>
>
>
>
>    To
>  hobbit at hswn.dk   cc
>
>   Subject
>  Re: [hobbit] Messages file not reporting
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 22:31 +0100, Etienne Roulland wrote:
>
> Edward Croft wrote:
> > Why thank you. I did find the one line:
> > It does not currently provide any data for the system-log "msgs" column.
> >
> > That is all it says. Does not currently. Sooooo when can it be
> > expected, if ever?
> > This one thing prevents me from using it as the programs that monitor
> > our systems
> > write warnings into the log file which currently gets picked up by big
> > brother and an
> > alert sent.
>
>
> You can use external script from *http://www.deadcat.net/*to monitor your
> logfiles.
>
>
> To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> *hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk*
>
>
>
>
> *Thank you. I appreciate your response.*
>
> --
> Edward M. Croft
> Sr. Systems Engineer
> Open Ratings, Inc.
> 200 West Street
> Waltham, MA 02451-1121
>
>
>
>
>
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>   --
> Edward M. Croft
> Sr. Systems Engineer
> Open Ratings, Inc.
> 200 West Street
> Waltham, MA 02451-1121
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