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Logsurfer Project
OverviewThe Logsurfer program was designed to monitor any text-based logfiles on a system in real-time. The large amount of log information collected (like all messages handled by the syslog-daemon or logfiles from your information services FTP, WWW etc.) makes it nearly impossible to check your logs manually to find any unusual activity. You need a program to do this for you. If you don't want to use a script that checks your logs in certain time intervals (like once a day) then you might be interested in the programs like swatch or logsurfer.
The first try: swatchThe swatch package (written by Todd Atkins, Stanford) was the first well known program to monitor logfiles. It uses a configuration file to build and start a PERL script that monitors a logfile. For every incoming message line it compares the line against a set of regular expressions (from the configuration file) and takes an action based on this line. Possible actions are: echo this line, ring the bell, execute external programs, pipe the message into an external program, send it via mail to other people or use the write command to forward the message to some users. The idea is simple and effective but has some major problems:
LogsurferDue to the limited possibilities of swatch (especially the limitation on single lines and the missing possibility to parse substrings of the message as arguments to external programs) the logsurfer program was developed. Just to list some of the important things:
Example Messages
Messages detected by swatch
somehost ftpd[14311]: cmd failure - not logged in This maybe an interesting message but this single line isn't enough to make a decision.
Messages detected by logsurfer
somehost tcpd-ftpd[14311]: connect from host.some.where somehost ftpd[14311]: connection from *@host.some.where [42.42.42.42] somehost ftpd[14311]: USER anonynous somehost ftpd[14311]: PASS password somehost ftpd[14311]: failed login from host.some.where [42.42.42.42], anonynous somehost ftpd[14311]: SYST somehost ftpd[14311]: PORT somehost ftpd[14311]: cmd failure - not logged in somehost ftpd[14311]: LIST somehost ftpd[14311]: QUIT somehost ftpd[14311]: FTP session closed Now you can easily see, that the user has misspelled the loginname "anonymous" and has tried to get a directory listing (ftp command "dir"). He has recognized the error and logged off. So you can forget this message...
DocumentationCurrently the following documentation is available: Some people have not installed TeX on their systems and may not be able to read the documentation of the GNU regex library (with explanation of the special regex chars for POSIX_EGREP that are used by the logsurfer). Here are some versions as DVI and PostScript file available:
AvailabilityThe program has been released on April, 9th 1996. The latest version (v1.5a) is available via anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.cert.dfn.de/pub/tools/audit/logsurfer/
FAQCurrently I haven't received much questions. As a result there is currently no FAQ. This might change in the future. (Ha! Isn't that sentence better than the boring "under construction" phrase?)
Authors
Last modified: 28 April 2004
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