question

[Daniel Robitaille]

Eugene Cormier wrote:
> OK so I'm new on here, so maybe I should ask a question....
> 
> 1) I have an old P3 with 128mb RAM and I'm using it for an Apache/ssh
> server.....I've loaded xfce because I haven't been able to find good
> monitoring tools to use (bmon isn't bad for bandwidth) but I'm really
> looking for a monitor which is command line/ncurses that will tell me
> logins to apache (username logintime logouttime) anything like this
> exist?? (maybe as well it would be nice to know what files were
> requested).....for now I've been keeping my access.log and error.log
> open in gedit which notifies me when things have changed, but on this
> machine xfce+gnomesysmon+gedit is really chugging....plus I know I
> really shouldn't use a gui on my server (I did set it all up command
> line only from Ubuntu Server, I just couldn't find the mon tools I
> wanted)

You possibly want something like swatch:
   http://www.xfocus.org/honeynet/papers/forensics/swatch.html

I haven't played with it in a very long time (probably circa 2000 on 
some AIX servers of mine), but it monitors in real time any log file you 
want, and only display in an xterm specific warnings/errors/events you 
want to monitor.  So no gui involved.  At least that's what I remember 8 
years later :)  (note to self I should really re-install swatch to look 
at the logs of my current servers)

It is available from the Ubuntu's Universe repository


 > 3) are there any good python primers out there?

Dive into Python should be already installed on your Ubuntu system:

file:///usr/share/doc/diveintopython/html/index.html