The Xlogmaster is a GTK+ based program to monitor system activity (logfiles) & hardware status (devices) and take actions if neccessary.
Copyright (C) 1998 Georg C. F. Greve
The Xlogmaster is a GNU program.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Hint for people that are too impatient to read the full documentation (as I usually am):
RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON IN TEXT WINDOW BRINGS UP MENU
MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON IN TEXT WINDOW HIDES/SHOWS BUTTONS
The first version of the Xlogmaster has been written in 1996, using the XVIEW toolkit. I didn't like that toolkit too much so it all ended up in a pretty messy piece of code that was only compile-time configurable and not very stable -- I did use it for two years, though, always telling myself "I'll be writing a clean version soon".
June 1998 I finally managed to actually keep this promise and completely rewrote the Xlogmaster for the GTK+ toolkit (see `http://www.gtk.org/'). First I only intended to write it for my private usage but when I got a lot of feedback from people around the world I decided to make the Xlogmaster a real and regular project. With version 1.4.0 the Xlogmaster then became an official GNU program.
The Xlogmaster will allow you to monitor all your logfiles and all
devices that allow being read by cat. Furthermore it supplies
several filters that will do things from raising/hiding lines in the
text display to starting programs to send you a paging message about a
possible security breach.
If used wisely the Xlogmaster can make it very easy to keep track of everything that happens on your system and it can increase your systems security by quite a lot. This program has been written and published in the hope that it will prove useful to you but I do not guarantee for anything but my best will.
The Xlogmaster runtime usage is basically pretty simple. There is a button on the side for each entry and as you might have guessed clicking on the button will make the Xlogmaster display that entry.
There are more functions that are less obvious:
right mouse buttonwill bring up the menu.middle mouse buttonwill toggle whether the buttons are being shown/hidden.left mouse buttonwill pick the standard selection (for cut&paste).
these do only work in the text window, though.
Apart from that you can use the cursor-keys to move the standard selection around and activate it by hitting RET.
The configuration should be self explanatory, if you keep the mouse pointer over an object a small help window will pop up.
The Xlogmaster knows basically two modes of operation, the tail mode and the cat mode. Both modes are named after the programs they emulate.
For both modes you can give an interval -- this is the time (in 1/10 seconds) between two calls of the interrupt function. This interval directly determines how often the Xlogmaster checks for changes in the logfile (tail mode) or how often it replaces the data in the buffer with the current data (cat mode).
The tail mode basically works like using tail -f on a
logfile. It will read a file and then keep on reading whatever gets
appended to it over time. The Xlogmaster should also be able to catch
logfile rotations so you don't have to reopen it every time the logfiles
have been rotated.
The cat mode works like doing a cat <filename> so it reads
the whole file every time. This is neccessary for reading things like
the `/proc' devices.
The Xlogmaster has two classes of filters, enumerated Class 0 and
Class 1 filters. The main difference is that the Class 0
filters are filters being applied at display time while the
Class 1 filters are being applied at read-time.
Matching for the filters is always done per line -- patterns
that would match more than one line will never match anything !
The following filters are known:
As mentioned before Class 0 filters are being applied at display-time -- if a line triggered multiple filters only the one with the highest priority is being applied !
The filters are (from highest to lowest priority):
Lines that trigger this action will be hidden without paying attention whether the line triggered other Class 0 filters or not. Lines that do trigger any of these will be displayed the usual way.
Lines that triggered this acton will be raised (highlighted) without paying attention whether they also triggered a Lower action.
Lines that triggered this action will be lowered (lowlighted).
Class 1 filters are being applied at read-time --- logfiles with Class 1 filters are being watched in the background, the filters will do exactly the same thing regardless of whether you are just looking at that logfile or not.
The Class 1 filters will be triggered for each line they can be applied on, but each filter only once (even if the string would theoretically match multiple times). They do not exclude each other, though. Each filter that can be applied will be applied !
The button of the entry that triggered the alert will flash in the alert color and then slowly fades back to it's normal color. The alert color, the time it takes to fade back and the smoothness of the fading can be controlled at configure-time as well as runtime.
The purpose of this filter is to inform you of events that are of interest right now but become less important over time -- the fading back prevents a situation that you come back to your machine and find all the buttons in alert color additionally you get an impression of how recent the alert was if you catch it while fading back.
This filter allows you to start programs and/or scripts when a certain string shows up. This is potentially the most powerful of the filters. Your program gets it's information via environment variables or via commandline. The following variables / environment variables are known:
A word of warning: the execute entry will only process one command and substitute the variables accordingly. If you want to create a more complicated setup I'd recommend to write a small shellscript. This especially means that piping will not work.
This filter has been implemented for events that are of extreme
importantce regardless of when they have been triggered. A notice box
is being popped up at the current mouse position. This notice box
contains a list with the time and date of the triggering action as well
as the name of the entry that triggered it. If you click on an entry in
this list you'll see the triggering line in the text field below the list.
If you set `--notice-follows-mouse' at startup the notice box will
move to the current mouse position every time something new has been
added.
For people who like to keep the Xlogmaster iconifed because of space shortage. If you set this filter the Xlogmaster will uniconify automatically when a matching line has been seen.
The Xlogmaster has Open Sound System (OSS) support. For every
Class 1 filter type (the only exception being execute) you can
define a sound that gets played whenever this filter type has been
triggered.
The requirements that the sounds have to meet are simple: They need to
be playable via cat <soundfile> > /dev/dsp. This usually means
they should be about 8KHz and in a standard format (`Wave',
`ULaw' or `SUN audio' for instance).
Please check out the commandline options for setting of the
soundfiles. If nothing is given the Xlogmaster will use the files in
`$prefix/etc/sound'. The standard is to play back the files
called `notice', `alert' or `uniconify' -- I'd recommend
to make then symbolic links instead of actually copying the files there.
There are two different filetypes used for configuration by the Xlogmaster. One is the GTK+ special style file, the gtkrc file I do not want to say too much about that one because it is documented with the GTK+ toolkit (See Info file `GTK', node `Resource Files') and it's format is actually pretty simple. A look at the sample files distributed along with the Xlogmaster should already solve all questions, so feel free to check them out and try around with them. They allow you to control the look of the Xlogmaster any way you want and it's definitely worth risking a look.
The Xlogmaster internal configuration file is pure ASCII and can hence be processed easily with any text editor although you will most probably not need to do so because the customization menu is much nicer.
The format is line oriented, this means every entry needs to use exactly
one line. Entries that do not follow this policy will be ignored.
There are two kinds of entries for the configuration file, the first is
a line that contains the mode of the entry along with it's name
and some more information. The format for this kind of entry is
`MODE{FILENAME,INTERVAL,BUTTONTEXT,HELPTEXT}'
where the fields are the same as in the customization menu:
The second kind of entry is the one for the filters. A filter line looks like
`MODES{REGEX}'
the `MODES' are a comma separated list of filter modes (only one Class 0 filter is allowed) and the `REGEX' is a standard regular expression (see GNU Regex manual). The filter lines always apply to the
Available strings for the `MODES' are
Here are some lines to give you an example of how a proper xlogmasterrc file looks.
TAIL{/var/log/messages,3,System Messages,/var/log/messages}
RAISE{greve}
HIDE{accesswatch}
HIDE{faxqclean}
HIDE{uucpcontrol}
HIDE{touch.*/tmp/newsrun}
TAIL{/var/log/warn,3,Warning Messages,/var/log/warn}
TAIL{/var/adm/kernel,3,Kernel Messages,/var/adm/kernel}
TAIL{/var/adm/debug,3,Debugging Messages,/var/adm/debug}
RAISE,NOTICE{accesswatch}
HIDE{newsrun}
EXECUTE,CASE_SENSITIVE{uucpcontrol}{xlm-mail greve}
This document was generated on 20 November 1998 using the texi2html translator version 1.54.