Summary: Streaming syslog data to a CD-R?

From: David C. Kovar (kovar@webnexus.com)
Date: Tue Sep 22 1998 - 13:12:02 CDT


I originally asked:

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We'd like to stream our systlog entries to a "write once" medium of some
sort. Hard copy would work, but it's not terribly elegant, and hard to
search. We have a CD-R drive attached to our Solaris 2.5.1 machine
running Joerg Schilling's cdrecord package.

(ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/)

Unfortunately, it appears that you either need to write out an entire
filesystem or directory, or you need to write audio files. Perhaps
I am missing a simple trick.

What we'd *like* to do is eithe rcopy or split the syslog data stream
out to the CD-R drive as it comes in, preserving it in a permanent,
non-modifyable form.

Any thoughts on how to make this happen?

-------------

And the following people were very helpful in their replies:

poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
Jamie Lawrence <jal@ThirdAge.com>
Michael Hocke <michaelh@slmd.com>
Petro <petro@playboy.com>
Eugene Kramer <eugene@uniteq.com>
Roger Fujii <rmf@lookhere.com>
Phil Kao <Phil.Kao@artecon.com>
Francis Liu <fxl@uts.edu.au>
blymn@baea.com.au (Brett Lymn)
Craig Raskin <raskin@compusec.org>

------------

The basic answer is that this is not possible with current CD-R technology.
CD-R requires that you write out your data, usually a filesystem (or a
song, or a video clip) in one write and then close the session. To get
around this, you need to go to a WORM solution of some sort. It would be
possible to periodically write out a filesystem containing the log files to
the CD-R, or something similar, but that doesn't get me the real time
writes that I was looking for. Several options for building a secure
logging host came up, but that doesn't meet some contractural requirements.
I'd personally not mind simply writing it all out to a line printer, but
it's hard to sort the lines, or grep through them, alas.

There is some development work going on for packet drivers for CD-R that
would address this issue:

"You may want to goto the www.osta.org website and pull down the UDF spec.
that will describe the packet driver and the UNIX vendors that support this
format." (Phil Kao)

Thanks again to all who replied.

-David



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