On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Clemens Hermann wrote:
> Hi sean,
>
> > Here are a couple of benefits for throwing the logs into a database.
> >
> > 1) You can be dumb and create killer reports using Crystal Reports. (IE your
> > BOSS who dont know anything about qmail or unix)
>
> this is one of the reasons. I want to be able to query the database and
> generate HTML-Reports. I tend to use PHP4 because it seems to be
> relatively easy to generate such reports this way for someone who is not
> very experienced with databases
How you generate your reports is not dependent on what format the logs are
in. The log files are a database, just not a very convenient one for ad
hoc queries. Write an app to process the logs and populate a database, I
am not aware of something that already does that.
> > 2) If you have more then one server then you have a central repository for
> > all your logs.
>
> I only have one server but my log directory keeps on growing and for
> this reason I want to get all logs into a database. Now I have the
> problem that I have to set up 5000 Mail accounts and it is absolutely
> necessary to get monthly traffic reports. Furtermore it might come up
> that the customers want to know more about the accounts and I suppose it
> might finally be easier to geth this information in an HTML document
> from a database than from very large text log-files.
It sounds like you need several things, all of which fall under system
administration:
1) Log rotation
2) Post processing of logs
3) Log archival
I don't know of anything that you can just plug in and have this work, it
takes time, effort, knowledge of the systems and knowledge of your needs.
2 Possible scenarios:
1. Post process the logs with an app that creates database records. Daily
rotation of the log files would probably be best
2. Process the logs through qmailanalog or similar, take those results
and create database records. This saves you from having to reinvent some
wheels, but may not give you the detail you need.
$.02,
Bill Carlson
------------
Systems Programmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Opinions are mine,
Virtual Hospital http://www.vh.org/ | not my employer's.
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics |
