Linux Administration Cookbook

Reading local logs

In this section, we're going to look at the default place for logging on our machines.

Logging is great— it can tell you variously how healthy your system is, how busy it is, who's trying to attack it, and who's successfully gained access in the last few minutes.

It's fairly standardized these days, unless you're working with a Java application, and if you've got the patience to read through a log file, you might want to give War and Peace a shot afterward.