[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“The lowly and lonely log files sit there day after day
gathering dust and events as your system purrs along without issue.
That is, until something bad happens. Then you scramble to find out
why the system rebooted or had a memory problem. Maybe it was a
network denial of service attack. Or was it a runaway process? Or
worse still, a hacker after your MP3 collection. How will you know?
If you said, “Look at the logs”, then you’re halfway to a
resolution.“In most cases, those lowly log files are your best friends.
Disasters, system anomalies, user error and careless hackers all
leaves tracks in the logs. If you know where to look and what to
look for, you’re that much better off.“The Basics
“Log files (logs) are text files, owned by root or the
application’s daemon process user account, that receive entries
whenever some significant event occurs. And, significant can mean
anything from an HTML page view to an attempt to crack your root
user account”