Being that I am still in design time, I thought this might be a good place to start this.

I am starting a program for managing and monitoring log files on various flavors of Unix/Linux. The objectives are as follows:

* To be able to view log files or the last X number of lines from them.
* Rotate theses files on demand instead of waiting for logrotate (some machines don't have it).
* Retrieve different files from different servers.

These are the basic tasks I must perform, other 'spiffy' things will probably be added as time goes on.

What I am looking for is other ideas on how to go about getting the data from the remote servers. I am limited by not being able to have any sort of server process running on the remote machines. I will have both telnet and ftp access to those machines.

The first idea I had was to use open3 to telnet to the remote server and either cat or tail the logfile. This proved to be problematic. I then switched to using Net::Telnet. This worked fine in my original trials, but I am concerned about hangs. I have not yet tried ftp simply because I do not want to bring the file over to the local system, I just want to view it's contents, but it is still an option.

Essentially what I wanted to do was get the data from the remote server and store it in a hash with the servername:file as the key to the data. I am aware that this might also be a problem if someone tries to bring a 1GB file, but I am still working on the safety mechanisms for that. First I need to focus on how I am even going to get the data before I make it 'safe' to do.

Any ideas on how I can handle this unique circumstance?

Thanks in advance, Chad.

In reply to Viewing log files on remote servers. by gnu@perl

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