On Sep 11, 2009, at 7:21 PM, Mike Cappella wrote:
Most log messages in postfix-logwatch are either canonicalized or
summarized. In this case, the message summary change was an attempt
at being a little more clear, (but perhaps its not).
It's great ... when timesSeen > 1.
The canonicalization (and uppercasing of the first word) makes
strict grep'ing fail. Eg., the grep:
grep 'database is older than source file' would fail.
Which is why I always leave off the first char.
I thought the summary message:
Database file needs update
was clearer than the canonicalized:
Database is older than source file
esp. in context of the verbose output. Its best to use the summary
output as a hint to look at more detailed output, and of course the
logs.
It is clearer, and I did look. I just looked for the wrong thing. I
first searched for the string, then just "update". If it had said
"database file 'client_checks' needs updating" I would have found the
messages. And I wouldn't have been confused about whether it was
talking about a postfix file or some logwatch file I'd never heard of
("Hmmm. logwatch keeps a database of what it's seen in the mail log?
That's neat...")
OTOH, "older than source file" would have echoed what I see all the
time when I change a file in /etc that postfix keeps in its chroot jail.
Finally, as an FYI, you can look at the postfix-logwatch source to
see the section and pattern matches :
add_section ($S, 'databasegeneration', 1, 'd', '*Warning:
Database file needs update');
leads to :
} elsif ($warning =~ /^database (?:[^ ]*) is older than source
file ([\w\/]+)$/o) {
#TD warning: database /etc/postfix/client_checks.db is older
than source file /etc/postfix/client_checks
$Totals{'databasegeneration'}++; return unless ($Collecting
{'databasegeneration'});
$Counts{'databasegeneration'}{$1}++;
Oh! That's what those CVS sites I found were about! That's
significantly more complex than the little logwatch scripts I've
written :-)
This bears looking into and understanding. Thanks.
The real problem, I think, came up because this message is so rare.
I'm very used to all the others, and the .db files are 'never' out of
date because I use a shell script to add to them. ... And I didn't
know postfix was always looking out for me. Nice work, Wietse :-)
--
Glenn English
g...@slsware.com
