Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with logging

Best Practices in Sustainable Forest Management

53B3L1U5 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:15:01 -0800

I am looking for information related to sustainable forestry management. I have recently secured a consultancy in Central America for developing a business plan related to the industry. While my client has provided useful information, I am also looking for external resources on the subject. I am researching best practices, value-added services, international markets, and technologies for streamlining operations. The client has recently received a land concession of Caribbean pine which is divided into 30 plots, one of which is available each year for harvest. After 30 years the process is repeated, having given the forest enough time to biologically rebound. Hence, sustainability is achieved and the impact of logging is restricted to a relatively small area.

How do we spy on my wife?

twine42 — Fri, 08 May 2009 04:39:49 -0800

Suggest a program (or programs) that can help me track what is happening on a PC A couple of times now my wife has 'faded out' while in front of the PC. The last time it happened she swore that she had spent 3 hours reading the BBC website, but her browser history said she'd never been there - instead she'd been off wandering the internet looking at Star Trek sites.

It's not the first time it's happened, and it's got us both worried.

Can anyone out there suggest a program that we can install on her PC that will keep a log of what programs she has running? Ideally it would be good if it could also keep track of which program has focus and what web pages have been visited.

She's been aware of it when it has happened, so the program only needs to keep logs for 24 hours or so.

[I know this sounds creepy, but I promise you that this question is being asked with my wife's permission and logs will only be accessed with her permission.]

Logging https logins?

jmd82 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:37:24 -0800

Logging username logins on our web server? Our current student information system (hosted on site) does not natively log user logins for administrators to see. However, we would like to do so for various reasons.
Through logging IIS (MS Server 2003) activity or some other hackery, is there any way to do so? The log on page is done over https.

We're not looking to log actual activity- only that person x logged on at time z.

I has a pain in my linux logging daemon

SpecialK — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:58:56 -0800

Calling all *nix sysadmins in the hive mind ... a bunch of Unix and Linux logging/syslog/syslog-ng questions inside. Here's the setup. Syslog-ng 1.6+ on a bunch of SuSE 10.3 and 11.0 / BSD / RHEL 4.x machines set up to stream via tcp to a central machine. Central machine is, at the moment, set up to accept anything coming from machine X into /var/log/central/(machine name)/(facility)-(tag).log unless it matches another rule (for instance, auth and authpriv facilities get combined into one log with a different name.)

There's several questions blobbed in here with a lot of technical details. All of this is being done to meet requirements handed to us by auditors.

The first of those audit requirements is to log when a user accesses a resource by authenticating correctly, and to log when an attempted access is made at both the system, application engine (i.e. apache, mysql, tomcat) and application (i.e. the php, java code) levels. This is completely under control for system level accesses; apache is another matter since we use mod_auth_mysql heavily, but I'm working on that. (And as far as I can tell, it's not even possible with MySQL.) Any suggestions?

The second issue is with logs like php application logs (which are just appended to a file) mysql-error.log, mysql-slow.log, apache access logs, etc -- none of that even goes through syslog in the first place (with the notable exception of apache error logs, which can go to local7:info), so to get it into syslog as a transport layer I have a bunch of lazy man's daemons ... really, shell scripts running a "tail -f | /bin/logger.sh -t (sourcename) &" ... obviously a messy proposition that could cause system load to spiral out of control. Syslog-ng can "follow" a named pipe (which is pretty much what logger.sh does -- route any input to syslog-ng through the pre-existing named pipe), but cannot follow a file that's appended to. The pipe through logger.sh is required because I need to tag the log entry with the source so that we know where it came from.

On one of our systems, which runs a couple of applications plus nagios, I have about ten of these damned things running. With this setup, I dread getting an app hammered on that system because I can see the load average shooting through the stratosphere as all those nice slow shell scripts joust for I/O.

Now, why syslog? Why not just rotate the logs? Well, part of it's for security. I work for a big U. One of the obvious plusses of logging to a remote write-forward-only machine is that you give a cracker TWO systems that they have to remove traces of their nefarious work on. That means that updates to system logs need to be streamed 'live' over the network, not cached on the local machine and then FTP'd over at night when logrotate runs. I swear that these auditors were hired by Catbert.

I can't be the only one with the requirement to reinvent the wheel here. There's gotta be a better solution. Right? Oh, god, please tell me I'm right!

Seriously, any suggestions on how to meet this would be appreciated. Other than just "it's gotta be built out of somewhat stock distributed tools" (In other words, no, I don't want to implement an entirely custom logging solution, I can buy one that will be just as tough to maintain) I don't have any constraints or requirements -- disk space, CPU usage, network bandwidth, etc. are all pretty much moot. I just really don't want to have to reinvent the wheel and it feels like I am... which to me usually a huge sign that "ur doin' it wrong."

Help me log my work day...

inbetweener — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:26:27 -0800

Can you help me log my work day? I am suffering from very serious time management issues and want to try and log what I'm doing to keep track of my time.

Now i tried the quicklog script from Lifehacker for a while, but really I don't want to have to constantly call this thing up and log what I am doing. I've also tried the free software RescueTime software, but that really seems like overkill - I spend too long just unscrambling the huge amount of data it collects.

What I would like is some software that I could set up to pop up on my screen every hour and let me log what I have been doing that hour. That would serve to divide my day into hour long chunks for logging purposes AND more importantly remind me that I've been wasting my time for the last hour and get my ass in gear.

So, my question is, does this fantasy software exist, and if so where can I find it.

Thanks in advance

Good iPhone workout log application?

jagalt — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:40:09 -0800

Good iPhone workout log application? I am trying to find an iPhone application that would let me keep track of my workouts, preferably as I am doing them, and there's just too many in the store to make sense of. I'd like to be able to:

- Create custom workouts (weightlifting and cardio)
- Keep track of my weight
- Sync and backup to my computer / online service

I am fine with purchasing an app, so it doesn't have to be one of the free ones. If anyone has had any personal experiences with any of the apps and can recommend anything, it would be much appreciated!

Cycle GPS logger

primer_dimer — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 02:18:35 -0800

Best GPS data logger for (1) monitoring cycle commute and (2) local mapping So I've started commuting by bike to work again, but this time it's a bit further than I've done before - ~12 miles each way - so I want to start logging my speed etc. Rather than getting a speedometer, I'm thinking of getting a GPS logger which can record my position and then I can look at my stats. I'd also love to be able to play around with local mapping using GPS - the sort of thing they do on openstreetmap.org. I'm wondering what sort of hardware would be best for this. One limitation; whatever I get has to be linux-friendly, I guess ideally it would act as a USB mass-storage device, or write the data to an SD card in an easy-to-read format.

There seem to be plenty of cheap GPS loggers around (e.g. here ), but there are also units designed specifically for cycling (e.g. here). The cycle-specific units would obviously be nicer to use on the bike, since they'd show my speed in real time, but would they also be suitable for GPS mapping? Any suggestions for specific makes/models?

How can I import a 46GB database into MSSQL without ending up with a 46GB transaction log?

odinsdream — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:13:57 -0800

I need to import a database into MS SQL but I do not want to end up with a transaction log as large as the database. What's the best way to do the import? We're working with a software vendor to migrate their database into MS SQL. They set up an ODBC connection to their database and then use Enterprise Manager Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages to copy the tables into an MS SQL database.

However, at the end of their test pass we had a 46GB database file and a 46GB transaction log.

What's the best way to do this without creating such a giant log?

Connect Landline to PC?

bsexton — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:23:23 -0800

Is there a way I can connect a 4 line RCA 4 Line Executive Series phone to my PC to automatically log incoming and outgoing calls to measure phone productivity? Also if it came with an autodialer that would be great. The phone has a data port so I'm thinking I can connect to it some how. Thanks for the help!

Bandwidth monitoring per IP device?

doomtop — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:39:48 -0800

Bandwidth monitoring per IP device? I'm looking for a way to monitor bandwidth on a wireless LAN. I need to be able to see how much bandwidth any particular device on the LAN is using at any given time. This can be shown by IP address or MAC address.

Ideally, it would break down like...

192.168.1.a is using 654kbit
192.168.1.b is using 322kbit
192.168.1.c is using 12kbit
192.168.1.d is using 0kbit

How could I accomplish this? Would the router need any special features/logging/etc?

Bear in mind that most devices on the network will not be able to run an SNMP client.

Splunking files on Windows boxes

ajp — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 06:04:21 -0800

Getting Splunk running on Solaris 5.8, with log files on Windows boxes. So I've installed Splunk on a Solaris 5.8 box, and now I need to get some data into it. We have a large amount of Windows servers, among other things, with Tomcat logs that I'd love to get into Splunk. People currently remote desktop onto the servers and peruse the logs in Notepad.... ugh!

How best to do this?

It seems that the most obvious way is to mount the Windows drives using SaMBa so Splunk considers them to be locally hosted files (albeit from another server).

Any other way? The less painful, the better.

Let's assume disk space and network bandwidth aren't an issue. I'm just new to Splunk and not too sure of my options. I did RTFM but can't see much specifically about this. I'm sure it's there, somewhere painfully obvious.

User auditing in Windows Server 2003?

crios — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:15:47 -0800

Is there a way (or 3rd party application) to have Windows Server 2003 keep track of the number of logins in a computer lab? I work in a high school and manage 4 computer labs. Currently we have a workstation in each lab running filemaker pro that drop-in students sign in on before they sit down at a computer. In the middle of each year we can output the numbers and graph them and do all sorts of things to analyze the lab usage. This mostly works but many students fall through the cracks plus it's also a hassle on our parts and the students to constantly remind students to sign in. It's inefficient.

We are using Windows Server 2003 and I was wondering if anybody knows a way to keep logs of the logins in the labs that we can easily output and then drop into graphs to analyze the usage of the labs. I'm not sure if user auditing would help us here becuase we aren't really interested in the details so much as the numbers over (specific) time (i.e. a month or two or the entire year).

Does anybody know if Server 2003 can do this or if there is a 3rd party application that does this.

Cheap Temperature Logging

DU — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:55:41 -0800

How can I do cheap temperature logging? Is Arduino a good choice? I want to log temperatures unattended. It's in my yard on a periodic basis, so it doesn't need to be waterproof or anything, but I don't have a laptop (and the location isn't close to a window in the computer room) so I can't log right to the computer.

Temperature loggers seem to be pretty expensive and are single-purpose. Then I thought of the Arduino. For just $35 I can get a general purpose, reusable microcontroller, stick a thermistor on there and I'm done.

Except the idea of the Arduino is that it just passes the data back to the computer, it doesn't store it there. But there seems to be some storage space (in the "EEPROM") for about 512 bytes that I guess stays there even when it turns off. I wouldn't expect the temperatures to get above 255C (or the thermistor to read them if it does), so I think I can just stash one reading per byte once every N minutes for 512*N minutes of logging.

I'm more or less a n00b at electronics, but I do have some basic experience, tools and parts. The Arduino tutorials don't address this exact application, but there are several similar ones so I don't think it would be too technically hard.

Is there a cheaper solution out there? (I'm giving the general purposeness and reusability of the Arduino about a 15-20% bonus, so a specialized device would probably have to cost less than $28 or so to be worth switching to, assuming they both work about equally well.)

How to disable apache logging?

SpecialK — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:21:42 -0800

How do you disable access logging in Apache2? And yes, I did first RTFM. It's inaccurate.

The manual says to merely comment out the CustomLog directive. Unforutnately, this results in the logging defaulting to standard access logging. What's the actual best practice to completely disable access logging on an apache 2 server? Version 2.0. 52 on Redhat.

(This is for a high load server, and we're using an external logging system...)

Please help me find a phone logging app

Ezrie — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:44:28 -0800

Can anyone please suggest a hosted or downloadable app that would allow me to log phone calls simply and quickly? I have been using CRM systems from Microsoft, SalesForce, and Zoho for quite sometime. I am looking for something much simpler. Something that would allow me to create call recipients quickly and simply click on their name and write, "called, left message" and click save. Being able to set call status (i.e completed, started, waiting) is also important. I would want to be able to click the name and see a running history of phone calls with that person, and to be able to schedule future calls with alarms. Can anyone suggest something along these lines?

Thanks

GPS logger with big memory?

dmd — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:29:42 -0800

GPS with extremely large memory? I'm looking for something pretty much exactly like the Sony GPS-CS1 (reviewed here )... but that will allow me to download the data to a Mac when I'm done. (Though the GPS-CS1 mounts as a regular drive on a PC, it won't on a Mac...) Basically, I want something that will log to its internal memory for a very long time - I'm talking at least a few days - and then let me download that data. Time resolution doesn't have to be great - even only once a minute would be fine.

Discussed but not really answered here. I do not want to have to download my track religiously every day. Every couple days, maybe.

OSX app to log phone calls w/ datestamp from my stock G4 modem?

Wild_Eep — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:26:01 -0800

I need an OSX app that will make use of my G4s internal modem to receive caller ID information and log the time of the call. Using a standard G4 modem (which I don't believe is a 'voice' modem, but I could be wrong), is there a way to record who calls came from and when they happened? Bonus points for recording the duration of a call. Super-mega-bonus points if it can integrate into a billing/invoicing system. Cheaper is better. Here's my rig.

Website stats

Tlogmer — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 15:16:06 -0800

I need a free, easy-to-install program to analyze server logs. The info is there already, tucked away in the www_logs directory, but the host-provided analysis page ("analog reports") is too cluttered and ugly for my client. I tried installing awstats but it wanted me to mess with apache settings, etc, and all I really want is a script that'll go into the logs directory and make everything easy-to-read.