• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Logs, Logging, And Logger (Oh My)!

    Apple has a number of different logging APIs. For the past few releases, Apple has tried to capture everything possible in logs, creating what many administrators and developers might consider to be a lot of chatter. As such, an entirely new interface needed to be developed to categorize and filter messages sent into system logs. Writing Logs The logger command is still used to create entries in system logs. However, if you are then using tail to view /var/log/system.log then you will notice that you no longer see your entry being written. This is because as the logs being created in macOS have gotten more complex, the tools to read…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    log, logs, and logger

    This is the first page of a 5 page piece I just finished writing for MacTech. After the last episode of the MacAdmins podcast though, I wanted to go ahead and get some of the information out there. For a much more detailed analysis, check out MacTech! Apple has a number of different logging APIs. For the past few releases, Apple has tried to capture everything possible in logs, creating what many administrators and developers might consider to be a lot of chatter. As such, an entirely new interface needed to be developed to categorize and filter messages sent into system logs. Writing Logs The logger command is still used…

  • cloud,  Mac Security,  Network Infrastructure

    Configure Syslog Options on a Meraki

    Meraki has a syslog option. To configure a Meraki to push logs to a syslog server, open your Meraki Dashboard and click on a device. From there, click on “Alerts & administration”. At the “Alerts & administration” page scroll down to the Logging section. Click on the “Add a syslog server” link and type the IP address of your syslog servers name or IP. Put the port number into the Port field. Choose what types of events to export. This could be Event Log, Flows or URLs, where: Event Log: The messages from the dashboard under Monitor > Event log. Flows: Inbound and outbound traffic flows generate syslog messages that…

  • Mac OS X

    Logger In Bash

    When bash scripting, a useful command is logger. The logger command allows you to “make entries in the system log.” When using the logger command, you can write to your own entries to the system log. To show how this command works, we’re going to open two terminal windows, preferably side-by-side. In one window, we’re going to look at the output of the system.log file interactively using the tail command with the -f option tail -f /private/var/log/system.log In the other window, we’re going to simply enter the logger command followed by the word frogger: logger frogger This will show you an entry similar to the following: Jun 3 00:34:44 ce.pretendco.com…