README

The typical use of the piperlog and logmerge packages is to regularly provide
summaries of the system logs by email.  The packages don't force a default
setup for this, so here's a example.

First, we need to produce the file of patterns to ignore.  This can be produced
from an existing logcheck installation.  It uses the "discard" file in
/etc/piperlog/discard to get rid of logcheck patterns that you don't want.

  piper:~# piperlog-mkignore > /etc/piperlog/ignore

We add a new user, initialise the "offsets" file which tells logmerge where to
start reading the logs from (and which logs to read) and set up a cron job to
generate the summaries.

  piper:~# adduser --system --ingroup adm piperlog
  Adding system user `piperlog'...
  Adding new user `piperlog' (101) with group `adm'.
  Creating home directory `/home/piperlog'.
  piper:~# logmerge-mkoffsets /var/log/auth.log /var/log/syslog > /var/lib/logmerge/offsets
  piper:~# chown -R piperlog.adm /var/lib/logmerge/
  piper:~# crontab -e -u piperlog /etc/piperlog/ignore

  5 */4 * * * (REPLYTO=sysmans@example.com; export REPLYTO; logmerge | piperlog | mail -s "some.example.com log summary at `date`" mrlogreader@example.com)


Minor points:
  - piperlog uses pcre "Perl compatible" regular expressions (see
    pcrepattern(1)) rather than egrep "extended" regular expressions.
    There are few differences.  I found that the \< and \> word end sequences
    are not present, and repetitions are fussy about the preceeding part of
    the regexp (eg., r+{2,3} is not allowed).  In the logcheck rules I looked
    at these were only used by mistake, so they don't matter.