Interceptor 0.9 review

Syslog is a almost standard UN*X daemon which gathers all the info, errors or critical messages from the local computer or other host

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 575K Developer: Christophe Gros

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Syslog is a almost standard UN*X daemon which gathers all the info, errors or critical messages from the local computer or other hosts on the network. For more info about syslog itself, see the corresponding syslog manpages.

Before using Interceptor, you must create 8 fifo files in /var/run/interceptor, (debug, info, notice, warning, err, crit, alert, emerg) and modify the /etc/syslog.conf so that syslog sends its messages in the corresponding fifo for a given level, e.g.
*.debug |/var/run/interceptor/debug

The 'mkintfifos' included script will update /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and /etc/syslog.conf for you. When done, restart your computer, install the interceptor applet and load it on the taskbar.

A button appears, which will flash green when a debug, info or notice message occurs, orange when a warning or error message occurs and red when crit, alert or emerg.

If you click on this button, a list of received messages will be displayed.

Interceptor can react to some messages according to a pattern->action scheme with up to 2 argument strings. The available actions are the following ones:

* Beep: Simply issues a beep.
* Message: Displays a dialog box with first arg string as the wanted message and optionnaly executes a shell command when the 'yes' button is clicked. The command itself is contained in the second arg string.
* Redirect: Redirects the current message towards a specific log view.
* Run: Silently runs a shell command contained in arg string 2 and appends arg string 1 at the end of the system messages list.
Remark: if the first argument of a Run alert is null, the first line of the shell command stdout is appended to the messages list, with Info as the level and Interceptor as the source.

The pattern rules obey to the QRegExp syntax. See QRegExp in the Qt documentation for more details. In addition to the standard QRegExp syntax, Interceptor uses pattern groups, i.e. it can retrieve substring enclosed in group parenthesis. Example:
abc(.+)def

This group contains any string enclosed within 'abc' and 'def'. A substitution is made whenever a message matches with a given regexp. The variables $1, $2, $3 and $4 will be replaced with the corresponding pattern group in both arg 1 and arg 2 strings.

the variables $D and $T will be substituted with the current date and time

The patterns are tried against the
level##source!!host%%text

string, where level is debug, info etc..., source is the info source, i.e. kernel, the daemon name, lpr etc..., host is the hostname and text, the text of the message.

You can also choose a better suited icon, such as floppy, network or CDROM icons, for your dialog boxes.

When you select the preferences kicker applet menu, a tab widget will appears, which will allow you to edit the pattern->action rules, and some default options, such as the level colors and number of lines on the messages list box.

What's New in This Release:
Aspects Scan list.
A few bugs fixed.