On 12/31/2013 10:20 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Your proposal is irrelevant when we are talking about current reality.
No it is by no means not. By implementing my proposal this mail is not lost (as Lennart Poettering stated it in the devel list) by ending up in /var/spool/mail. If included in the installation process of Fedora, perhaps also mentioning that the user should/could set up their mail client to read spool mail, these message will definitely not be lost.
Sadly messages are lost in F20 as distributed now, read question 1 in the mail from Suvayu Ali titled "Manipulating journalctl output" dated 20:57 Jan 1, as an example.
He states that his journal says "Dec 30 04:36:05 <hostname> rsnapshot[8265]: /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily: ERROR: /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily: completed, but with some errors" but where to find that error? In F19 these errors would have been forwarded to the mail spool via /etc/aliases. Now it is lost.
journalctl is not a requirement to read logs. It is just far more easier than grepping through /var/log/messages for the common use cases.
As always that depends on the use case (see at the end). One nice thing with journalctl though, is the possibility to filter the last 10 minutes and similar, that is a bit awkward to do without using awk or similar on /var/log/messages (is it possible to filter out a time slice with journalctl, man page gives no clue?). But in all, a pure ASCII file is so simple that even a novice can handle it. And for grepping, journalctl is too slow.
As I mentioned before desktop environment have graphical utilities to read log files. gnome-system-log for /var/log/messages for example.
Yes, but it is a bit hard to filter using that. (On a side note, on my system the Date/time field is white text on white background which makes it a bit hard to read. (Do you have a solution for that))
GNOME is also getting a systemd specific log viewer as well https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2013-September/msg00097.html
OK. Tested that but could not get any usable output from it at the moment. Perhaps it is a bit too early to test it yet,
Other similar utilities are available for other DE's as well. If it is important, the DE should notify the user proactively and not wait on them to read some log file
On that I agree. And mail from logwatch is an example of that. Notifications another. But when you get notified, you tend to look up your logs, and then it is good if these are readily available, fast, and easy to handle.
Look at the following use case (Fedora 20). The journal starts in July, /var/log content in September. In this use case using simple text files is extremely faster than journalctl. Also note the differences is size.
(I have not done any changes to the configuration of the journal, so this could be the journal of a normal user (well, perhaps not, in this case it is my home web and mail server and it probably produces more journal data than a desktop user does))
[root@gw ~]# time journalctl | grep xyz ... real 25m31.478s user 11m2.966s sys 2m36.218s [root@gw ~]# time grep -r --exclude-dir=journal xyz /var/log ... real 1m6.362s user 0m2.253s sys 0m1.201s ... [root@gw ~]# du -sh --exclude=journal /var/log 620M /var/log [root@gw ~]# du -sh /var/log/journal 3.7G /var/log/journal [root@gw ~]# Lars -- Lars E. Pettersson <lars@xxxxxxxx> http://www.sm6rpz.se/ -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
