logging

[Julian Field]

At 23:32 12/09/2002, you wrote:
>On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 16:49, Julian Field wrote:
> > At 18:48 12/09/2002, you wrote:
> > >I understand that #5 would result in a large amount of data being
> > >generated in log files however the problem that I am attempting to solve
> > >is that the mailarchive function uses a *huge* amount of space when
> > >enabled.  In the end I am looking to generate per user, per domain and
> > >summary statistics from this type of log.  I can see where the TO field
> > >may end up as a fairly long string.  I understand if it seems impractical.
> >
> > Would your problem be solved by being able to archive different users' and
> > different domains' mail in separate directories, where you could then just
> > scan those directories themselves to produce reports on their contents?
> >
> > Would this be more useful than very verbose logs?
> >
> > >5. entries that could be used to create email usage reports.  For each
> > >email to have To, From, Subject, Date, bytes, and names of any attachments
> > >would allow for easier creation of user reports.
> > >
> > >Is there a limit on the length of a log entry? These would be *very* long.
>
>If that sort of information was going to be logged, and I'm not sure if
>that is something that MailScanner ought to be doing, it would seem to
>me that it would make more sense to push the data into a file or a DB.
>Syslog isn't very flexible in its logging format and we are talking
>about a big growth in the log files. Seems to me that if it were going
>into a separate log file or a DB the results would be easier to parse
>and the maillog would remain more reasonable. The downside of that kind
>of additional logging is that it is going to slow down MailScanner and
>the code will be larger and more complex.

Syslog already has hooks in it so that you can log to whatever file or
program you like, I'm not going to re-invent the wheel :)
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ