Logs

Contents

Logs

Introduction

A utility for viewing detailed event logs for the system.

Designers

Jon McCann

Objectives

By default, display a record of user session events
When user is an administrator, also display a record of system events
Allow the user to go back and investigate a problem later
View events by type and source
Identify events as problems to be shown in Oops! ?
Be able to show user events by default
Be able to show system events when authorized

Constraints

Relevant Art

GNOME 2

OS X

Windows 7

Discussion

For the unprivileged user case this would replace and enhance the legacy .xsession-errors file, be used for displaying a record/history of Problems (as defined in Problem Reporting), and detailed application logs.

Types of logs

System update history
Application update history
Diagnostics
Crashes
Alerts

Tentative Design

System Logs.png

Comments

some services use ASCIIart in log messages, so a fixed width font might be better than proportional
- specifically, for the "raw" report; the summary can of course be pretty and use a proportional font
full-text search (of all fields in all journal entries) could be quite slow and inefficient
- restricting to a handful of well-known fields (for example: _COMM, _EXE and _SYSTEMD_UNIT) would be faster (most useful in the case of a single "search" field)

Logging examples

ASCII art

Spaces are frequently used as indentation to group related kernel log messages.

Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel: MTRR variable ranges enabled:
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   0 base 0FFC00000 mask FFFC00000 write-protect
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   1 base 000000000 mask F80000000 write-back
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   2 base 080000000 mask FC0000000 write-back
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   3 base 0C0000000 mask FE0000000 write-back
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   4 base 0DC000000 mask FFC000000 uncachable
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   5 base 0DB000000 mask FFF000000 uncachable
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   6 base 100000000 mask F00000000 write-back
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   7 base 200000000 mask FE0000000 write-back
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   8 base 21F000000 mask FFF000000 uncachable
Jun 13 19:50:29 localhost kernel:   9 base 21E800000 mask FFF800000 uncachable

Same process (Google Hangout browser plugin) emitting log spew to the session manager.

Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: No bp log location saved, using default.
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:000] Browser XEmbed support present: 1
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:000] Browser toolkit is Gtk2.
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:002] Using Gtk2 toolkit
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:011] Starting client channel.
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:013] Warning(clientchannel.cc:436): Unreadable or no port file.  Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:014] Warning(clientchannel.cc:411): Could not initiate GoogleTalkPlugin connection
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:014] GoogleTalkPlugin not running. Starting new process...
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:014] Warning(optionsfile.cc:47): Load: Could not open file, err=2
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:014] Warning(pluginutils.cc:251): Failed to get GoogleTalkPlugin path. Trying default.
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:018] Started GoogleTalkPlugin, path=/opt/google/talkplugin/GoogleTalkPlugin
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:019] Waiting for GoogleTalkPlugin to start...
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: sh: lsb_release: command not found
Jul 03 18:08:23 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: [000:928] Starting client channel.

Same process (dconf-editor) emitting log spec to the session manager. Useful prefix should make combining successive messages easier.

Jul 03 18:36:41 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: ** (dconf-editor:27027): WARNING **: dconf-schema.vala:330: Unknown property on <schema>, extends
Jul 03 18:36:41 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: ** (dconf-editor:27027): WARNING **: dconf-schema.vala:330: Unknown property on <schema>, extends
Jul 03 18:36:41 lenovodave /etc/gdm/Xsession[722]: ** (dconf-editor:27027): WARNING **: dconf-schema.vala:330: Unknown property on <schema>, extends