Managing your log files

“In this tutorial we’ll begin by taking a peek inside a few log
files to get a hint about the kind of stuff you’ll find there: then
we’ll move on to examine some tools for summarising and managing
the files.

“Logged messages fall into two broad types: low-volume messages
that you might want to read line by line, and high-volume messages
that really need to be summarised.

“Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of the low-volume
type first.

“e1000: 0000:04:03.0: e1000_probe: (PCI:66MHz:32-bit)
00:0e:0c:4a:42:4e
e1000: eth0: e1000_probe: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection
e1000: eth0: e1000_watchdog_task: NIC Link is Up 10 Mbps Full
Duplex

“Exhibit A is taken from the kernel’s ring buffer – these three
lines show a kernel module discovering and initialising a network
interface. Such messages are encouraging if you have added new
hardware and are trying to establish if Linux can find it.”

Complete
Story