phplogcon

Requests for RPMS, or new coding projects related to server administration, Plesk, security, or anything else you can think of.
BruceLee
Forum Regular
Forum Regular
Posts: 879
Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2009 6:58 pm
Location: Germany

phplogcon

Unread post by BruceLee »

Hi everybody,

what do you think of phplogcon? I think it's good, but I'm a little bit unhappy with the security as I would use it on my rootserver.

WEB:http://www.phplogcon.org
DEMO:http://demo.phplogcon.org

Thanks for feedback
faris
Long Time Forum Regular
Long Time Forum Regular
Posts: 2321
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 11:19 am

Re: phplogcon

Unread post by faris »

I'm not convinced a gui is the best option for looking at logs.

I use multitail to monitor loads of logs at once, using regular expressions on some in order to focus on the important stuff. It allows you to highlight things in colour (regex based too), select a displayed log and scroll back, search witin the log, and well, all sorts of things all at the same time. An rpm is available in the rpmforge repo.

Basically multitail is sort of similar to "tail -f" on steroids, with a turbocharger and a supercharger added just for fun. It is a very useful tool.

Faris.
--------------------------------
<advert>
If you want to rent a UK-based VPS that comes with friendly advice and support from a fellow ART fan, please get in touch.
</advert>
BruceLee
Forum Regular
Forum Regular
Posts: 879
Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2009 6:58 pm
Location: Germany

Re: phplogcon

Unread post by BruceLee »

multitail is great and generally you are right. But for a human being it's almost always faster and easier to work with visual interfaces.
Of course console based apps are better for individual tasks that a gui has not implemented and many many administrative things which would
make me crazy doing it via gui. Concerning logfiles I'm having a 50/50 opinion.
I had a few discussions with people who were convinced that they are always faster in filtering out two logfiles with some special conditions than
I am with the gui. I was finished with the gui in 30 seconds. After 15 Minutes and many regex's, nested requests and conditions they gave up.
This situation changed when filtering should be done the gui can't handle. Quite often a logfile search leads to another one and so on.
It takes some time to create a set of default scripts/commands to tail down everything they way you want it.
A gui, when it's well programmed, can take some work away from you. Like the ASL interface does.
Right now I have not found a good solution but phplogcon looks at least interesting in my opinion.
faris
Long Time Forum Regular
Long Time Forum Regular
Posts: 2321
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 11:19 am

Re: phplogcon

Unread post by faris »

Well, in terms of security, does it run its own http server, like asl does? If so you could just firewall that port out on everything other than your own IP.

If not, you could always use .htaccess or plesk's built in protected directory stuff to limit access to the entire website. There's a small danger that a password could be guessed, or that the .htaccess method may fail, but if there's an additional password to login to the loging system then it should be reasonably safe. You could even have multiple levels of access so that you'd have to enter two or more usernames and passwords before you even get to the logging system's login. Add some social engineering tricks to confuse the bad guys if they do try to password guess and get it wrong, and you have a relatively sure installation.

Faris.
--------------------------------
<advert>
If you want to rent a UK-based VPS that comes with friendly advice and support from a fellow ART fan, please get in touch.
</advert>
BruceLee
Forum Regular
Forum Regular
Posts: 879
Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2009 6:58 pm
Location: Germany

Re: phplogcon

Unread post by BruceLee »

thanks for your thouhgts and recommendations faris,

I will think about it, if and how I want to start this "project".
Post Reply