GUI notifications from syslog

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Nuno Sucena Almeida wrote:
> I don't know exactly what you pretend, but I always enjoyed the visual result 
> of 'root tail':
>  http://home.schmorp.de/marc/root-tail.html

Thanks for the suggestion, but not quite I'm looking for. I already have 
a desktop screenlet that does much the same thing (limited to one log 
file per window; currently using it to monitor kernel messages...mostly 
just to test it out; I don't find it that useful).

Generally I'm looking to avoid ongoing visual clutter. The idea is to 
display critical messages that need attention immediately in a highly 
visible manner. Otherwise not take up any screen real estate. (I don't 
really have an interest in watching raw log files. I use logwatch to 
summarize the interesting stuff.)

In the absence of any better suggestions, I'll pursue the idea of coding 
up some Perl glue to use libnotify. I was hoping the libnotify package 
came with a command line tool, but it apparently doesn't. No big deal. 
It'll just be a few lines of Perl to create something that reads from a 
named pipe fed by syslogd.

I'm just surprised this problem hasn't been solved several times over. 
It should be a common need. I've seen a similar solution applied to a 
specific domain. For example, Debian/Ubuntu has the smart-notifier 
package which is a Python program that displays an alert message on your 
desktop if there is a SMART disk error (it works with smartd). Why not 
have a more general solution that displays all critical syslog messages 
on the desktop, and then just have smartd log a message of the 
appropriate priority?

  -Tom

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Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
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