I’m not sure if any of you know Linux or Unix for that matter, but there is a centralised logging system called syslog. It’s one of the oldest parts of *nix and is by modern standards, horrendously out of date. It logs system data and events to flat files… only flat files.

As part of Trap25 we need to move to a database system so our customers can see what is going on in terms of email blocking, quarantines and delivery. This means pushing log files to mysql. With the old syslog this is impossible.

I recently stumbled across syslog-ng which besides being a better replacement for syslog, can output logs directly into mysql, on local and remote servers. This is what we will be using, after some trials, on Trap25.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.