Getting rsyslog to display to console

[fishface]

I trying to get rsyslog to send messages in /var/log/secure (or auth) to my desktop, tried xconsole but not without much success.

I have a few servers and I would like to get live alerts of attempted logins and the such like, some how displayed, I have various email alerts configured and they do alert pretty quickly (mostly seconds), but there is nothing eye-grabbing like having console or even (I dream) some sort of pop-up.

Any ideas?

[Pafnoutios]

If you're willing to keep a console window open and logged into the server with read privileges to the log file, then 'tail -f' should keep the contents of the file updated to the screen.

I suppose a desktop applet could be written to monitor the file the same way and present a popup for each new line written to the file. I'm not sure what keywords to try a search on to see if it already exists, though.

[fishface]

Thanks for the reply.

Ideally I would like the output of tail -f (or use some of the xconsole options in rsyslong to accomplish this...but it seems it is buggy from what I've read) on each server to be aggregated to a single stream on the console/tty (?), then redirected to my machine....all sounds feasible and was wondering/hoping if an app/script was already out there...maybe not then.

My scripting skills are not up to it at the moment...:(

[Pafnoutios]

I think there's a way for system logs to be sent to a central log server. Try Google and/or man pages for more information. Then logs will automatically be enmeshed and a single tail -f will be sufficient.