[Box Backup] Logging

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Pete,

> Sorry for my laziness...  (I'm afraid to ask, are there other pages on 
> the wiki that might yield logging ideas, while you're there under the 
> hood?  Future plans, 0.20 plans, Troubleshooting?  Sorry.)

I'm not aware of any other places where such gremlins might be hiding - 
perhaps in the robot spam on our wiki? :-) If anybody knows, please speak 
now, or forever pause your console.

> Please see my feature request about keeping the account numbers in the 
> logs consistent.  I've since started making my account numbers as 8 
> characters starting with a non-zero, like 10001234, so that it appears 
> the same (I think) in all the different log entries, but before that, my 
> log grepping scripts had to trap the different formats of the account 
> numbers (case, leading zeros, leading 0x(?), e.g.).

Yes, I was going to make the logging of these account numbers consistent, 
as you requested. My plan was to format them all as 0x01234567 (i.e. 8 hex 
digits prefixed by 0x). Any objections?

> My angle, as the store server admin, as listed in my feature requests, 
> is that I need to constantly monitor my machine as much as possible to 
> make sure my customers' data are safe.  I won't have ready access to the 
> client logs (and actually don't want to have to reach out to what I hope 
> will be dozens and dozens of them), so I need to store server to be 
> fairly chatty about how things are going, and to rely on the client to 
> somehow get what might be a lot of info into the store server log.

I can definitely understand that, but I think the server does not have 
all the information required to debug some problems, especially as the 
files on it are encrypted and opaque. When you do need to go to the 
client, you want the logs there to be clear, concise and accurate as well.

> Add automated periodic compare to client. Maybe a daily quick compare 
> and a weekly late-night full (or nearly so) compare. 
> http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/boxbackup/2006-February/002240.html 
> (PJ) it'd be nice if I could see the results of those client-run 
> compares in the store-server log somehow.

Only the client knows this. Perhaps we could add a protocol command that 
the client sends to the server to request it to log a message? That's not 
really about the logging infrastructure though. Can you add it to the 
feature requests please?

> (Not knowing anything about it, except that I am at the moment making 
> backup copies of commercial dvds [Led Zeppelin, Buckethead; to keep my 
> kids from scratching the originals] using cdrecord with the dvd patch 
> and I happened to notice that it carries a cygwin1.dll with it, so I 
> wonder if that would be a useful trick to use to set up a cygwin cron 
> service to do what you need it to do?  Sorry if that is way off.)

It is possible to use Cygwin cron to schedule tasks on a Windows machine, 
but it's definitely not the right cup of tea for most Windows users. It's 
also quite heavyweight. Windows has its own was to schedule tasks, I 
believe, but unlike Cron it doesn't capture console output to mail to the 
admin. That's why it might be useful for the command line tools to be able 
to log to syslog.

Cheers, Chris.
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