syslog

created on Wed, 2007-08-01 12:49

In October of last year, I wrote a couple of articles, one about openness with regards to open source documentation and another about learning to embrace not knowing everything about the software or service you're documenting. I argued that if you're committed to openness in the support process, then you're also committing to asking for help when you don't know the answer to something. As the support master for Bryght, I've been tasked with writing some documentation for new functionality we added for in our new Bryght Basic profile, i.e. the ability to route system messages to essentially anywhere. This will be part of core for Drupal 6, and it has been backported for our Drupal 5 VPS customers. (Boris posted the reverse bounty, and Khalid came through with a backport.) I've written some skeletal documentation on the new Syslog module, I've been able to figure out and document routing Drupal logs to a file, which you can run the Unix tail command on to get a live view of what's happening on the site:

In that screenshot you can see that I typed in two URLs I knew to throw a 404 error message, tried a URL I knew would get access denied, created a test blog post then deleted it. It contains a lot of information, like the date, the site in question, the URL accessed, and the error/status message.

created on Thu, 2007-04-05 15:29It's been a while since I helped organize a reverse bounty. On the auction block is some great functionality that is likely going to make it's way into Drupal 6, but is super useful for:

• high traffic sites
• ISPs / mass hosting
• enterprise deployments
• people that like having their website instant message them

Today, the watchdog table logs regular system events (e.g. users logging in, creating new accounts, or posting content) as well as error conditions and other explanatory notes. On a high traffic site, the watchdog table must be pruned on a regular basis so that the database table doesn't grow wildly out of control. There is also no way to archive this information.

Enter Khalid's (2bits.com) patch for Drupal 6: instead of only logging to the database, the patch will enable the destination of logging to be configurable. Raw text file, syslog, and email logging are all modules that have been implemented as proof of concept using this new system.

But seeing this, many of us immediately wanted this functionality for Drupal 5. Much like Bryght's system included free tagging of categories and configurable RSS feed support in our hosted 4.6 version, functions in future versions of Drupal can be backported. That's what this reverse bounty is for – we've spoken with Khalid, and he's willing to make this functionality available via a patch to Drupal 5, including the porting of the support modules such as syslog and email notification. How can you help? Well, we're gathering funds using ChipIn -- click on the Flash widget below to contribute. If you really want to help promote, grab the ChipIn widget and post it on your own blog or website.