Listen to your log files

[VirginSnow at vfemail.net]

"Jon 'maddog' Hall" <maddog at li.org> writes:

> I believe a good product for sysadmins would be "SmellTrouble(TM)",
> where systems that are in good shape would generate smells like
> chocolate, soda or good coffee, and systems that are in bad shape would
> generate smells like....well you could have your choice.

LOL.  What a fantastic idea!  I'm gonna have to design a PCI card to
do that... oh, wait.  That would be better implemented as a USB
device, wouldn't it?  That way your smells would be mobile, and the
device could be of arbitrary size.

Interestingly, modern logging daemons generally allow logging to pipes
to other processes, generally by specifying a filename starting with
"|", a la Perl.  That means that, with a filter in between the logger
and the player, you could syslog to sounds/sights/smells in real time.
You would hear (smell?) events as they happened.  (Kinda reminds me of
running Windows. ;)