I use ssh tunnels to my home-machine to get access to my pop3 mail and to send mail via SMTP, as certain firewalls, etc. sometimes prohibt access to my servers. Therefor I have to open up some ssh-sessions with portforwarding to get mails.
I could use putty to open some hidden screens, but I don’t like the idea of having several unseen windows pile up in the backgound of my Windows XP, so I keep them visible. To put them to good use, I tail some — for me — important logfiles in those windows.
In the past, I used to set up putty to send the command su - -c "tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log" to the remote machine. I then had to enter the root-password to see the logs. Cumbersome, slow, error-prone and quite anoying in case your Internet-connection brike down several times.
FBN suggested using „screen” to fix some of my problems. After some RTFMing I wrote this litte gem:
screen -a -A -d -m su - -c "tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog /var/log/auth.log" Now I have only to start the script once, do a „screen -r” and enter the password. In putty, I only have to give „screen -r” as the command to send to the server after login and „everything is good” (tm).
I can now just reattach to the running screen-session and see all my logs without having to enter any password or restart some tools. Very cool.
Du findest diesen Text auch in m³s online Pamphlet.
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Elegant logging with screen
