Live-tracking of Squid and Dan's Guardian logs
Feb 12th 2008
Another day, another incremental Surftrackr improvement. One of the items on my to-do list is to enable live take-on of logfile data, rather than requiring a log upload. Although I haven't subjected the program to rigorous testing yet, I'm pleased to announce surftrackr-livelog.py just made it into the utils directory.
The surftrackr-livelog.py program runs as a daemon and tracks the Squid or Dan's Guardian logfile. Consider this an experimental feature: use it at your own peril.
You should check in the admin interface for the newly-added "Logfile" setting:
Set it to the location of your squid or DG access logfile. Save the change, and you should be able to start up surftrackr-livelog.py:
cd utils
python surftrackr-livelog.py
It runs as a daemon (terminate-and-stay-resident for all you old timers out there) so if you see no errors, it's working.
If you get an error, it might be related to permissions: make sure the user running surftrackr-livelog.py has permission to read your squid or DG access logfile. Note that I do not recommend using the root user for this, since (like I said) I haven't tested this thoroughly yet and the surftrackr-livelog.py script might be exploitable (I doubt it is, but, well, you know...)
You should now be able to view live log data being added to your Surftrackr database, in real time.
As ever, the new code can be downloaded from the Surftrackr download site.
HTH,
Simon Burns
12 Feb 2008