On Thursday 17 March 2005 12:57, Chris Wright wrote:
Steve, are you working on processing log data, do you have a
preference?
Yes, I am working on a utility to process the data. I have 4 comments:
1) Fields that magically appear and dissappear are problematic for fast
parsing.
2) There should be a way to control what fields the kernel emits. The
dissappearing fields are what I take to be a stab at message compression. By
having a mask driven approach and always emitting those fields, we can parse
faster and have compression.
3) Fields that potentially have a space, tab, or carriage return in them need
escaping or quoting if they are sent in human readable format.
4) There should be a mode/format status variable so that in the future we can
tell the kernel to switch to another (binary) format. This way human readable
records can go to syslog and special apps like the audit daemon can switch to
another format (binary data ?) which might be more efficient. I haven't spent
anytime looking at what makes sense for a binary format, nor do we have time
for that right now. But I'd like to look at that in the future.
-Steve Grubb