Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail

Fudgie writes "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong. A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X). It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at fudgie.org for an example movie, and more information."

Comments

Sorry, but the boss won this bet

[nurb432]

its still NOT entertaining.. Its more bizzare then anything else.

Re:Wow !

[bughunter]

I bet that screen will go ballistic when you get Slashdotted

Look closer. It already is ballistic.

syslog, not ssh+tail -f

[allenw]

Why use ssh + tail -f when one can send the output to a centralized syslog server? There isn't any need to setup an account, keys, etc. when you can have the individual servers consolidate the data for you.

seconded

[Cheesey]

Remote syslog also means that your servers are more secure: (a) because it is harder for crackers to falsify remote logs as they need to compromise two machines, not just one; and (b) because your visualisation program doesn't need access to SSH keys for all of the machines it monitors, so a compromise on the visualisation computer doesn't automatically mean that all of the servers can also be compromised. However, you could presumably adapt this tool to use syslog quite easily.

Not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

A weekend

It *really* shows that this was hacked together over a weekend. I've spent 15 minutes trying to get it to run, and all I see are Ruby warnings about about obsolete code, and failed dependencies. I've installed about a dozen packages to try to satisfy this beast's dependency hunger, but to no avail. Behold:

$ ls /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/ssh
connection lenient-host-key-verifier.rb service userauth
errors.rb null-host-key-verifier.rb session.rb util
host-key-verifier.rb proxy transport version.rb
$ ./gl_tail-0.02.rb
./gl_tail-0.02.rb:55:Warning: require_gem is obsolete. Use gem instead.
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:312:in `report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem net-ssh (>= 0.0.0) (Gem::LoadError)
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:246:in `activate'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:75:in `active_gem_with_options'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:60:in `require_gem'
from ./gl_tail-0.02.rb:55
$

Nothing to see here folks, just some Works On My Machine crap by some Ruby fanboy who can't keep pace with Ruby's latest whims about how people should write their code.