------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SARAH - Syslog Automated Rotation and Archive Handler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ** Current Version: 0.9.1b ** What is Sarah? Sarah is a program which is used to trim, rotate, archive and delete log files. It is meant to run periodically out of cron, determining what to do based on a configuration file. Sarah is currently in beta testing. The current version is being distributed without any guarantees that it will work, or that it won't delete everything on your system. That is not to say that I expect Sarah to blow away your files; I use Sarah to rotate my own logs. That's why I wrote it. Much more information is available from the Sarah homepage: http://sarah.sourceforge.net/ ** Where can I get it? Development of Sarah takes place at SourceForge. The current version can be downloaded from there at http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sarah/ or by FTP from ftp://ftp.conundrum.com/pub/sarah/ ** Requirements At this time, Sarah is known to run with the default distributions of perl 5.8.0, 5.6.1, 5.005_03 and 5.005_02 on FreeBSD 3.x, and Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6 and 2.7. It is expected that Sarah will work with any perl5 interpreter on any POSIX system, but testing should be done to confirm this. If you run Sarah on a system not described above, please send a quick note to me at mattp@conundrum.com to let me know how it goes. Sarah currently requires that your perl5 installation is setup to allow the use of syslogging, even if you don't plan to use the syslogging features of Sarah. If you haven't already, it may be necessary to convert your local syslog.h header file to a perl header file. See the perldoc on 'h2ph' if Sarah dies complaining that it "Can't locate syslog.ph". ** Licensing This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file LICENSE in the archive file you downloaded, or see the comments at the top of the source for the program itself. ** Installation Installation is not yet automated, however it can be accomplished in just a few simple steps: 1) Edit the top of the sarah program, changing the $config, $compBin, $compSuffix, $rotate_msg and $syslogdPID variables to suit your system. The defaults there will match current FreeBSD 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 the compressed file suffix correctly. 2) Copy sarah into the binary directory of your choice. /usr/local/bin/ is the usual choice. 3) Copy sarah.conf.sample into the location you set for $config at the top of sarah, then modify it to meet your needs. sarah.conf is usually stored as /usr/local/etc/sarah.conf 4) 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' 5) 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. That's it! Sarah should now be running, and rotating your logs for you. ** Support, bugs and other beasties We'd all like to believe there aren't any (bugs or beasties), but this is software, after all. Bug reports are more than welcome (in fact I insist on them), as are feature requests and pleas for help. Bugs should be submitted to the tracking system on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46581&atid=446633 Support requests as well: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46581&atid=446634 And feature requests: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46581&atid=446636 There are also two mailing lists to which you can subscribe: sarah-announce: The sarah-announce mailing list is for me to make announcements about new releases and updates of the software. Subscribe to this if you just want to know when something new happens. Traffic is extremely low.. say one message every two months, on average. sarah-support: This is for discussion among the users of sarah. It's useful for getting help, reporting bugs, or asking for new features. All are welcome. Traffic is very low at present. You can subscribe to either list by sending email to ecartis@conundrum.com with the command "subscribe sarah-announce" or "subscribe sarah-support" in the body of the message. I don't recommend subscribing to both, since messages to sarah-announce are automatically copied to sarah-support. You can also subscribe via a web interface at http://www.conundrum.com/ecartis/. ** Famous last words... Thanks for using Sarah! I hope to hear how you like it. If you want to send me some feedback, but don't feel like getting involved in a mailing list, please feel free to send your comments directly to me at mattp@conundrum.com. I also invite new users to drop me a line letting me know how many systems they're using sarah on. I guarantee this is not an attempt to harvest email addresses, or any other such nefarious activity, but simply a means for me to have some idea of the extent to which sarah is being used out in the world. Much thanks, Matt Pounsett ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- $Id: README,v 1.4 2004/02/07 02:19:57 succorso Exp $ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------