The easiest way to generate a report from your log file
is to send your log file to a responder. The report
will be sent to you by email to the address specified in the
Reply-To: or
From: header. To use a responder,
you only need your standard mailer.
To save bandwidth, responders accept log files compressed using gzip, compress or zip. The log file can be sent in the email body or in a MIME attachment.
Although any mailer will do, you should take care of the following when sending your log file:
Make sure that your mailer won't insert new lines to wrap long log lines.
Make sure that your mailer sets the standard MIME headers when using transfer encoding.
When sending the log file as a MIME attachment, make sure that there are no other attachments (such as a signature) after the log file.
As a public service Stichting LogReport Foundation offers an online responder. To use it, you just send your log file to the appropriate responder for the log format you are using. The email addresses available can be found at http://logreport.org/lire/or/ .
Example 3.1. Sending a Log File For Processing To A Responder
In this example, a bind8 query log file is sent to the LogReport responder for processing. The report will be sent back to the user who ran the mail command.
$ mail -s "Bind8 Log" log@bind8-query.logreport.org < \
/var/log/query.log
To save bandwidth, please send big log files in compressed format only. E.g., do:
$ mutt -s "`hostname` `date`" -a \
/var/log/apache/common.log.1.gz log@common.logreport.org < \
/dev/null
For more privacy, it is possible to send an anonymized log to the responder. Consult the section called “Sending Anonymized Log Files To A Responder” for more information.