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Sawing Linux Logs with Simple Tools

By: Carla Schroder
Monday, September 20, 2004 11:22:15 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/5576/1/

Good Ole grep

So there you are with all of your Linux servers humming along happily. You have tested, tweaked, and configured until they are performing at their peak of perfection. Users are hardly whining at all. Life is good. You may relax and indulge in some nice, relaxing rounds of TuxKart. After all, you earned it.

Except for one little remaining chore: monitoring your log files. [insert horrible alarming music of your choice here.] You're conscientious, so you know you can't just ignore the logs until there's a problem, especially for public services like Web and mail. Somewhere up in the pointy-haired suites, they may even be plotting to require you to track and analyze all sorts of server statistics.

Not to worry, for there are many ways to implement data reduction, which is what log parsing is all about. You want to slice and dice your logs to present only the data you're interested in viewing. Unless you wish to devote your entire life to manually analyzing log files. Even if you only pay attention to logfiles when you're debugging a problem, having some tools to weed out the noise is helpful.

The simplest method is a keyword search. Suppose you want to separate out the 404 errors in your Apache log, and see if you have any missing files:

$ grep 404 bratgrrl.com-Aug-2004
...
212.27.41.34 - - [30/Aug/2004:02:25:13 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 - "-"

Pompos/1.3 http://dir.com/pompos.html"
65.54.188.90 - - [30/Aug/2004:10:32:26 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 - "-" 
"msnbot/0.11 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
207.65.113.58 - - [12/Aug/2004:06:49:11 -0700] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" 
"Opera/7.21 (X11; Linux i686; U)  [en]"
...

These entries are typical. This site has no

robots.txt

or favicon, so any requests for these files generate a 404 error. The first two are Web bots. The third entry is probably some random surfer. You can ignore these. So let's screen out

robots.txt

and favicon, and see what is left:

$ grep 404 bratgrrl.com-Aug-2004 | grep -v -E "favicon.ico|robots.txt"
....
200.16.116.3 - - [29/Aug/2004:20:59:27 -0700] "GET /images/142spacer.gif HTTP/1.0"
 404 - "http://www.bratgrrl.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030131"
200.16.116.3 - - [29/Aug/2004:21:00:08 -0700] "GET /email_crimes.html HTTP/1.0" 404
 - "http://www.bratgrrl.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.7 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20030131"
....

Now we're getting somewhere. These two files —

images/142spacer.gif

and

email_crimes.html

— are referenced somewhere on the Web site, but they do not exist. This is something that should be fixed. How to find the URLs that refer to these files? grep can do this too. Suppose all the site files are in

/var/www/bratgrrl

$ grep -R "142spacer.gif" /var/www/bratgrrl

Here's another cool grep trick for Apache logs. You doubtless noticed that the above examples were referred from http://www.bratgrrl.com. When you're checking to see where your traffic is coming from, you don't care about local referrals. Weed them out with this:

$ cat bratgrrl.com-Aug-2004 | fgrep -v bratgrrl | cut -d\" -f4 | grep -v ^-
http://www.computerbits.com/archive/2004/0800/schroder0408.html
http://www.pdxlinux.org/resources/nw_linux
www.dianagaydon.com/
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/
http://www.techsupportforum.com/computer/topic/3520-1.html
http://us.altavista.com/web/results?tlb=1&kgs=0&ienc=utf8&q=carla+schroder

Now you can see where traffic to your site is coming from, uncluttered by local references. Here's how it works, piece by piece:

fgrep -v bratgrrl means "look for the literal string bratgrrl, then exclude lines that contain it."
cut -d\" -f4 means "using quotation marks as the delimiter, print only the text in the fourth field." The fourth field is the text between the third and fourth quotation marks.
grep -v ^- means "exclude lines that start with a hyphen." Try running the command without this to see why.

More Simple Stuff

Crafting clever, complex regular expressions is quite fun, and a more worthy use of one's time than comatose drooling in front of "Reality TV." However, there are many simple searches that do the job just fine. You can search

/var/log/auth.log

quickly to see if anyone has made an inordinate number of failed login attempts. The -i option does a case-insensitive search:

$ grep -i "fail" /var/log/auth.log
...
 Sep 13 16:26:34 server02 PAM_unix[27462]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for
 ssh service
 Sep 13 16:26:36 server02 sshd[27462]: Failed password for root from 12.34.45.67 port 
 3210 ssh2
 Sep 13 16:26:38 server02 PAM_unix[27464]: authentication failure; (uid=0) -> root for 
 ssh service
 Sep 13 16:26:40 server02 sshd[27464]: Failed password for root from 12.34.45.67 port 
 3210 ssh2
...

Well well, someone came a' knockin' on the SSH (secure shell) door. Knowledge is power--at this point, you could fine-tune your iptables to drop packets from the originating IP, or you could do a little sleuthing to find the source, or you could create a nice honeypot and amuse yourself trapping the no-good person trying to get into your system. You can even count the number of attempts:

$ grep "12.34.45.67" /var/log/auth.log | wc -l
8656

That's a rather persistent little twit, I'd say.

Syslog, The Dumping Ground

The syslog--/var/log/syslog--is a dumping ground for log entries from all kinds of daemons, such as Samba and cron:

$ grep -i samba /var/log/syslog
Sep 13 08:50:47 windbag nmbd[1123]:   become_logon_server_success: Samba is now a 
logon server for workgroup HOMENET on subnet 192.168.1.5
Sep 13 08:50:51 windbag nmbd[1123]:   Samba server WINDBAG is now a domain master 
browser for workgroup HOMENET on subnet 192.168.1.5
Sep 13 08:51:06 windbag nmbd[1123]:   Samba name server WINDBAG is now a local 
master browser for workgroup HOMENET on subnet 192.168.1.5

$ grep -i cron /var/log/syslog

Aug 18 21:18:01 windbag /USR/SBIN/CRON[1752]: (amavis) CMD (test -e /usr/bin/sa-
learn && test -e
 /usr/sbin/amavisd-new && /usr/bin/sa-learn —rebuild >/dev/null 2>&1)

These two snippets demonstrate that you can verify that certain Samba functions are working correctly, and that your cron jobs are running when you want.

Another useful item in /var/log/syslog is those strange-looking MARK messages:

Sep 13 19:10:30 windbag — MARK —
Sep 13 19:30:30 windbag — MARK —
Sep 13 19:50:30 windbag — MARK —

This is where you find out if your system rebooted during the night when it wasn't supposed to; the MARK sequence will be interrupted, and you'll see shutdown and startup messages.

Next month's Scripting Clinic will show how to set up automated email alerts, so when something nasty that requires your attention shows up in your logs, you won't be left in the dark.

Resources

See the man pages for grep, cut, and wc.
Linux in a Nutshell, by Ellen Siever, is my #1 indispensable Linux command reference

[Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on CrossNodes, a JupiterWeb site. -BKP]