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What is Sarah?
Sarah (Syslog Automated Rotation and Archive Handler) is a
logfile archival tool similar to older programs such as
newsyslog. It is designed to be run periodically out of
cron, and will trim, rotate, archive, and delete log files based on
criteria laid out in its config file.
That's a pretty general overview, and begs the obvious
question:
Why should I use Sarah instead of my OS's log rotation
tool?
Put simply, Sarah is intended to be much more flexible than
whatever came with your OS. The idea for Sarah was originally
conceived when I first had to administrate a farm of Solaris
machines (Solaris comes with no log rotation tool whatsoever).
However, it quickly became apparent that with a little work it
could easily improve on the tools included with other POSIX
operating systems. For further discussion, see the feature list.
Where can I get Sarah?
The current release of Sarah is version 0.9b. There are now two
main distrubution points:
Sarah is also included in the FreeBSD ports tree at
/usr/ports/sysutils/sarah/
Development of Sarah takes place at SourceForge. Visit the Sarah project page here.
How do I install Sarah?
There are several simple steps to installation:
- Edit the top of the sarah program, changing the path to
perl and the $config, $compBin, $compSuffix, $rotate_msg and
$syslogdPID variables to suit your system and taste. The defaults
there will match most current systems. $compBin and $compSuffix may
be changed to use any compression program, not just gzip. sarah has
been tested using gzip, compress, bzip and bzip2, but any
compression program which will accept the -f (force) switch will
work as long as you set $compSuffix correctly.
- Copy sarah into the binary directory of your choice.
/usr/local/bin/ is the usual choice.
- Copy sarah.conf.sample into the location you set for $config at
the top of sarah, then modify it to meet your needs. By default,
the config file is stored as /usr/local/etc/sarah.conf
- If you want, copy the man page (sarah.1) into the man section 1
directory. Don't worry if you choose not to do this. You can still
access the sarah documentation by typing 'perldoc sarah'
- Set cron to run sarah periodically. Sarah is normally run as
root every minute. Consult the crontab(1) or crontab(5) man pages
on your system if you're not certain how to do this. Common crontab
entries for sarah might look like one of these:
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/sarah
* * * * * root /usr/local/bin/sarah
Check the perl documentation ('perldoc sarah') or the sarah(1) man
page for command line arguments you may want to use.
What other documentation is there?
At present, just the POD documentation included with Sarah. Once
Sarah is installed you can access it by typing `perldoc sarah` in
your shell, or if you've installed the man page, `man sarah`. You
can also view the Sarah man page online: sarah(1)
What support is there for Sarah?
There are two mailing lists for Sarah users:
- sarah-announce:
- This list carries announcements about new releases and updates
to the software. Subscribe to this if you just want to know when
something new happens. Traffic is extremely low -- approximately
one message every couple of months.
- sarah-support:
- This is for discussion among users of Sarah. It's useful for
getting help, reporting bugs, or requesting new features. All are
welcome, though I wouldn't recommend subscribing to this if you're
already on sarah-announce; all -announce messages are copied to
-support.
You can subscribe to both of these mailing lists by sending a
message to sarah-announce-request@conundrum.com
or sarah-support-request@conundrum.com
with the subject "subscribe", or by visiting the web interface at
http://www.conundrum.com/ecartis/
If you have a request or comment to make, but don't want to get
involved in a mailing list, I would invite you to email me
personally at mattp@conundrum.com. Please note
however that if it seems appropriate I may copy any replies to the
support list. Also available is the SourceForge's Tracker
system, which you can use to submit
bug reports, ask for
support, or request a
feature.
So what features does Sarah have already?
The current feature list is already, I believe, well ahead of
the default tools, and is growing steadily. Here's what's there
now:
- Ability to set default parameters for any following log
entries
- If you have a dozen log files, all rotated at the same time of
day, just set the rotation time once, rather than repeating
duplicate information for all entries.
- Rotation based on date and/or time and/or file size
- The date/time specification for file rotation is extremely
flexible, based primarily on the logic used by Vixie Cron. The size
specification is also flexible, allowing you to specify file size
in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. Unlike some other
rotation tools, you can also alter the logical operation used when both a date
and size are specified for a file (AND vs. OR).
- Rotate files into an alternate directory
- Each log file has the option of having its archived files
stored somewhere other than the directory where the log itself
resides. This is useful for keeping your log directories clean when
you keep a large number of log files, or for storing old logs in a
central repository such as on an NFS mounted filesystem.
- Ordinal or date-based archive naming
- Archived logs can be named with an ordinal extention (.0 for
most recent, .1 for next most recent, .2 the next, etc.) or with a
date extension of the form .yyyymmdd-x, where x is 0 for the
first log rotated that day, 1 for the next, etc.
- Sortable archive file names
- Index numbers on archive files are always padded to allow a
listing of files to sort correctly.
- Syslog reporting
- Sarah can send send errors or other output to syslogd instead
of, or as well as, to STDERR.
License
Copyright © 2000-2002, Matt Pounsett. This software is
distributed under the terms of the GNU General
Public License.
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