Logfiles Made Interesting with glTail

Fudgie writes "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong. A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X). It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at fudgie.org for an example movie, and more information."

Not "Fudgie", glTail

[gumpish]

It's pretty obvious that fudgie.org is just the name of the site and glTail is the name of the program.

Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect

[Fudgie]

Still running at 30 fps with ~25 requests / second.

Re:doom

[xappax]

perhaps you mean this: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ [unm.edu]

GNU GPL

[wikinerd]

#!/usr/bin/env ruby # gl_tail.rb v0.01 - OpenGL visualization of your server traffic # Copyright 2007 Erlend Simonsen # # Licensed under the GPLv2

Hey, this is not the correct way to apply the GNU GPL licence. I don't know whether you had very little time available or just don't care, but the correct way is to explain exactly what licence (full title) the program is under and enable the user to find the licence (provide a copy of it and explain that the author of the licence is FSF, giving their address). We nerds of course understand completely what you mean, but other people may have no idea what you are talking about. To learn how to apply GPL on your program read this [fsf.org].

Good work, by the way. Was there any reason you preferred GPLv2 and not GPLv3? Also from the wording of your licence I think that you intended this to be available only under v2 and not v3 (you say "Licensed under the GPLv2" without a "or any later version" clause).

Running glTail on Windows

[Mazin07]

If you want to run glTail on Windows:

1. Use the One-click Ruby installer from rubyforge (not Cygwin ruby)
2. Make sure to `gem install net-ssh`
3. Change "require 'glut'" to "require 'glut_prev'" to enable legacy GLUT ruby bindings

Took me a while to figure this out.

Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect

[Fudgie]

Not sure why it stopped for you, I've had it running throughout a slashdotting without any problems at all. Peaked at 3500 req/min and still spewed dots from all the correct places at 30 fps.

Re:just a ploy to visualize the slashdot effect

[Fudgie]

You're correct, and I will be adressing this in the next version. It's currently limited to 1000/FPS per second.

Re:I hate flash!

[Fudgie]

Grab the divx version of the movie, then.

Re:Not impressed

[Fudgie]

Try and install the gem version of net-ssh or change the require_gem to plain old require so you use the packaged net-ssh instead? I've got net/ssh in

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/net-ssh-1.0.10/lib/net/ssh

and

/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/net-ssh-1.1.2/lib/net/ssh

depending on which Ubuntu version I'm running.

It's not hard, and quite a few have been able to get it running on Linux, OS X and Windows. FreeBSD is still a no-go.