Logging in style
I wrote a short intro to syslog, in order to stop using it.
Learn about socklog, svlogd and other alternative logging mechanisms.
Because logs are your best friends.
I wrote a short intro to syslog, in order to stop using it.
Learn about socklog, svlogd and other alternative logging mechanisms.
Because logs are your best friends.
I posted yesterday that I liked Arch but I called it "not too good". So, Mark Kretschmann posted a comment asking what I didn't like.
It's not too much, but here it goes:
The upgrades sometimes are a bit painful (switching to udev was a bit hard).
The policy of deleting the package documentation is evil. Really.
The startup system is too simplistic. No default order of startup scripts means sometimes it takes trial and error to figure out what goes first. Hal or dbus? hwd?
The package selection (without unsupported) is somewhat skimpy (no perl-net-server? no perl-html-template?) but that's probably my POV because I am a bit server-oriented.
Some basic packages make scary assumptions. For example, if you have a user with UID 89 when you install mysql server, weird things may happen. Same for UID 40 and named.
On the other hand, the good side (at least for an amateur like me) is a bazillion times bigger.
I have been on Arch for a while now.
So far, not bad. Not too good, either, but it is a fun distro.
I am thinking of using it as a base for my ever-vaporous personal small server distro.
You can see any progress I make by searching for my packages in AUR (search for submitter ralsina). AUR is really a nice thing to have for a hobbyist. You put your stuff there, people can find it, they can even try it, comment on it, vote on it... really a very nice community site for a very hobbyist distro.
At least in the sense that they are really full of people with bad intentions...
The red stripe are connections blocked because the sender is listed in spamcop.
The blue stripe is connections blocked because the sender is in NJABL.
The darker green stripe is connections that are rate-limited because they look like a DOS or address spam (client connecting too quickly)
The top green line is SMTP connections.
The thin white stripe is real connections that we allow to send email.
Of course when you look at those...
42% are spam (yes, the filter is quite efficient).
So, about 1 in 5 connection attempts actually intends to send a real, good, valid email.
I am amazed this email thingamajig still works.
Traditionally, you graphed your system's status using MRTG but nowadays, there are much nicer tools, and I like Munin.
For MRTG+qmail there are many scripts, but I couldn't find one I liked for Munin.
Since munin is modular, it's easy to fix, of course.
First, get the excellent qmrtg which gives you great, quick, awesome multilog-crunching tools.
Then, check the cods, check the munin plugin docs, and it's pretty much a 20-line thingie. In shell.
I would post it, but my blogging tool hates shell code :-)
And you get your graphs. I am probably going to write a collection of these and publish it somewhere.