Mining the logs from the famous DistroWatch.com website enables to formally assess the trends in the GNU/Linux ecosystem. In particular, this first part analyzes the popularity of Ubuntu with respect to the former predominance of Mandriva.

Last week we provided an introduction to the Linux system logs. (See Logs: Your Linux System’s Lovable Worker Bees.) Now, what will you, as a system administrator, use to watch logs? Logwatch, of course. As so many others have succinctly put it, messing with log files is a royal pain in the backside. Logwatch makes the experience of keeping track of system activity almost painless for you.

Octopussy is a solution to manage your logs (also frequently called a SIM/SEM/SIEM Solution). Basically, it stores your logs, produces reports, and raises alerts.

phpLogCon provides a user-friendly Web interface to your system logs. It can handle logs from both Linux and Windows systems, so an administrator can log in to a single phpLogCon site to see what is happening on all the machines on a network.

Vlogger is a little tool with which you can write Apache logs broken down by virtual hosts and days. With vlogger, we need to put just one CustomLog directive into our global Apache configuration, and it will write access logs for each virtual host and day.

Can't bring yourself to love logs? You should take a second look. The lowly and lonely log files sit there day after day gathering dust and events as your system purrs along without issue. That is, until something bad happens.

New python library to allow to develop quickly and easily python programs that are dealing with logs.

Log files are critical to managing Apache. Managing these logs can provide advance security warnings, provide detailed information in terms of who is visiting your site and where they are coming from and much more.

Welcome to this year's 28th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!