Announcing LUSER Log Monitoring Tool

[Warren Togami]

I am pleased to announce the first public release of LUSER - Log Unix Syslog
E-mail Reporter, under the GNU General Public License.

http://luser.mplug.org

LUSER works similarly to Psionic Logcheck, a popular tool that many Unix
admins use to filter and see only important syslog messages via e-mail
reports.

This is a preliminary version that _works_, but has a few bugs if you make
your rules in a certain way.  Our wildcard parser was written from scratch
and has some annoying limitations at the moment.  Most of the codebase was
written in Java for an ICS211 assignment last semester by a few members of
my group in class, so it is a bit rough, uncommented and hastily coded.
Also Java is far from the best language to write such a tool (perl, C, or
C++), but surprisingly it works well, and it is actually faster than the
bash based logcheck.  I hope to port this to a more suitable programming
language sometime in the future.

I am currently using it on all my servers and my friend's site
http://www.amdmb.com .   I wrote this program to replace logcheck, and allow
more flexible e-mail reports.  I hope to make the parser more robust soon,
along with e-mailing warnings when "df" falls below a certain percentage of
free disk space.  Please e-mail me if you think of some other important Unix
subsystem that should be checked.

I would be intersted to hear if it works under FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD
with Linux emulation running the JVM, or under Sun Solaris.  If you run it
on Solaris, you may need bash if it is not already installed.

Please e-mail me any questions, comments, patches, or flames.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com
Mid-Pacific Linux User's Group
http://www.mplug.org