More on presentation of logs ...

[mike_p]

1/ Formatting logs.

I think we can improve on the 'raw' display of logs, so I've been experimenting with better formatting.

I've written a simple function to go in the show_log.php script that converts the data into an html table:

function log_to_table($datastring) {
  $data_lines = explode("\n", $datastring);
  $html = "<table class='log_table'>";
  foreach ($data_lines as $value) {
    $items = explode(' ',$value,6);
    $html .= "<tr>";
    $html .= "<td>$items[0] $items[1]</td>"; //date
    $html .= "<td>$items[2]</td>"; //time
    $html .= "<td>$items[3]</td>"; //server
    $html .= "<td>$items[4]</td>"; //user
    $html .= "<td>$items[5]</td>"; //data
    $html .= "<tr>";
    }
  $html .= "</table>";
  return $html;
  };

then I replace the nl2br function with log_to_table.

After that we need a little tidying up with the css. In my test I use:

table.log_table td {
     font-family: Trebuchet MS;
     font-size:8pt;
     border-width: 1px;
     padding: 1px 3px;
     border-style: solid;
     border-color: #ded;
     min-width:4em;
     }

Conceptually I'm not sure where it should be placed. In my case I've added it to the end of content.css.

2/ In Redhat[Centos] and Gentoo distributions the maillog, mail error and mail warning logs all show the content of maillog.

I propose we split the logs.

1. Edit /etc/syslog.conf replace

# Log all the mail messages in one place.
mail.*                                                  -/var/log/maillog

with

mail.info;mail.!warn    /var/log/maillog
mail.warn;mail.!err     /var/log/mail.warn
mail.err        /var/log/mail.err

then restart syslog with /etc/init.d/syslog restart

2/ Adjust ISPConfig to use the new error and warning logs:
Edit monitor_core_module.inc.php around line 1666 change

case 'log_mail_warn':
	if($dist == 'debian') { $logfile = '/var/log/mail.warn'; }
	elseif($dist == 'redhat') { $logfile = '/var/log/maillog'; }
	elseif($dist == 'suse') { $logfile = '/var/log/mail.warn'; }
	elseif($dist == 'gentoo') { $logfile = '/var/log/maillog'; }
	break;
case 'log_mail_err':
        if($dist == 'debian') { $logfile = '/var/log/mail.err'; }
        elseif($dist == 'redhat') { $logfile = '/var/log/maillog'; }
        elseif($dist == 'suse') { $logfile = '/var/log/mail.err'; }
	elseif($dist == 'gentoo') { $logfile = '/var/log/maillog'; }
	break;

to

case 'log_mail_warn':
	$logfile = '/var/log/mail.warn'; 
	break;
case 'log_mail_err':
        $logfile = '/var/log/mail.err'; 
	break;

I've tested in Centos, can't be sure of Gentoo.

Might also need to have a play with "logrotate".

Anyone interested in this being incorporated into the next release?

[mike_p]

Time to revisit this!

I've just had to troubleshoot some mail problems and found the standard mail log presentation very poor. Having updated ISPConfig since my last look at mail problems, my changes had been lost.

I'm running on Centos, so for some strange reason ISPConfig decides to use/show the main maillog for warnings and errors.

Almost worse, because it shows the logs without replacing HTML entitities, the display of email addresses in the logs gets mangled.
example: some mail log messages show email addresses as
<john@example.com>
because of the bracketing ('<'..'>') webbrowsers will assume an unknown html tag and not show the content.

So as in the first post in this thread (with one small change) I recommend adding this to show_log.php

function log_to_table($datastring) {
  $data_lines = explode("\n", $datastring);
  $html = "<table class='log_table'>";
  foreach ($data_lines as $value) {
    $items = explode(' ',htmlentities($value),6);
    $html .= "<tr>";
    $html .= "<td>$items[0] $items[1]</td>"; //date
    $html .= "<td>$items[2]</td>"; //time
    $html .= "<td>$items[3]</td>"; //server
    $html .= "<td>$items[4]</td>"; //user
    $html .= "<td>$items[5]</td>"; //data
    $html .= "<tr>";
    }
  $html .= "</table>";
  return $html;
  };

Then replace

$logData = nl2br($data);

with

$logData = log_to_table($data);

then follow the instructions for adding to the css
----------------------------
The second change was to ensure that the warnings and logs are in separate logs. /the instructions remainthe same as my original post except the changes to monitor_core_module.inc.php should now be made to monitor_tools.inc.php instead.