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SARAH - Syslog Automated Rotation and Archive Handler
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** Current Version: 0.9.1b


** What is Sarah?

Sarah is a program which is used to trim, rotate, archive and delete log
files.  It is meant to run periodically out of cron, determining what to do
based on a configuration file.

Sarah is currently in beta testing.  The current version is being distributed
without any guarantees that it will work, or that it won't delete everything
on your system.  That is not to say that I expect Sarah to blow away your
files; I use Sarah to rotate my own logs.  That's why I wrote it.

Much more information is available from the Sarah homepage:
http://sarah.sourceforge.net/


** Where can I get it?

Development of Sarah takes place at SourceForge.  The current version can be
downloaded from there at http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sarah/ or by FTP
from ftp://ftp.conundrum.com/pub/sarah/


** Requirements

At this time, Sarah is known to run with the default distributions of perl
5.8.0, 5.6.1, 5.005_03 and 5.005_02 on FreeBSD 3.x, and Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6 and
2.7.  It is expected that Sarah will work with any perl5 interpreter on any
POSIX system, but testing should be done to confirm this.  If you run Sarah on
a system not described above, please send a quick note to me at
mattp@conundrum.com to let me know how it goes.

Sarah currently requires that your perl5 installation is setup to allow the
use of syslogging, even if you don't plan to use the syslogging features of
Sarah.  If you haven't already, it may be necessary to convert your local
syslog.h header file to a perl header file.  See the perldoc on 'h2ph' if
Sarah dies complaining that it "Can't locate syslog.ph".


** Licensing

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.

See the file LICENSE in the archive file you downloaded, or see the comments
at the top of the source for the program itself.


** Installation

Installation is not yet automated, however it can be accomplished in just a
few simple steps:

1) Edit the top of the sarah program, changing the $config, $compBin,
   $compSuffix, $rotate_msg and $syslogdPID variables to suit your system.
   The defaults there will match current FreeBSD systems.

   $compBin and $compSuffix may be changed to use any compression program, not
   just gzip.  Sarah has been tested using gzip, compress, bzip and bzip2, but
   any compression program which will accept the -f (force) switch will work
   as long as you set the compressed file suffix correctly.

2) Copy sarah into the binary directory of your choice.  /usr/local/bin/ is
   the usual choice.

3) Copy sarah.conf.sample into the location you set for $config at the top of
   sarah, then modify it to meet your needs.  sarah.conf is usually stored as
   /usr/local/etc/sarah.conf

4) If you want, copy the man page (sarah.1) into the man section 1 directory.
   Don't worry if you choose not to do this.  You can still access the Sarah
   documentation by typing 'perldoc sarah'

5) Set cron to run sarah periodically.  Sarah is normally run as root every
   minute.  Consult the crontab(1) or crontab(5) man pages on your system if
   you're not certain how to do this.  Common crontab entries for Sarah might
   look like one of these:

   * * * * *            /usr/local/bin/sarah
   * * * * *    root    /usr/local/bin/sarah

   Check the perl documentation ('perldoc sarah') or the sarah(1) man page for
   command line arguments you may want to use.

That's it!  Sarah should now be running, and rotating your logs for you.


** Support, bugs and other beasties

We'd all like to believe there aren't any (bugs or beasties), but this is
software, after all.  Bug reports are more than welcome (in fact I insist on
them), as are feature requests and pleas for help.

Bugs should be submitted to the tracking system on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46581&atid=446633

Support requests as well:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46581&atid=446634

And feature requests:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=46581&atid=446636

There are also two mailing lists to which you can subscribe:
sarah-announce:
   The sarah-announce mailing list is for me to make announcements about new
   releases and updates of the software.  Subscribe to this if you just want
   to know when something new happens.  Traffic is extremely low.. say one
   message every two months, on average.

sarah-support:
   This is for discussion among the users of sarah.  It's useful for getting
   help, reporting bugs, or asking for new features.  All are welcome.
   Traffic is very low at present.

You can subscribe to either list by sending email to ecartis@conundrum.com with
the command "subscribe sarah-announce" or "subscribe sarah-support" in the
body of the message.  I don't recommend subscribing to both, since messages to
sarah-announce are automatically copied to sarah-support.  You can also
subscribe via a web interface at http://www.conundrum.com/ecartis/.


** Famous last words...

Thanks for using Sarah!  I hope to hear how you like it.  If you want to send
me some feedback, but don't feel like getting involved in a mailing list,
please feel free to send your comments directly to me at mattp@conundrum.com.
I also invite new users to drop me a line letting me know how many systems
they're using sarah on.  I guarantee this is not an attempt to harvest email
addresses, or any other such nefarious activity, but simply a means for me to
have some idea of the extent to which sarah is being used out in the world.

Much thanks,
Matt Pounsett

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$Id: README,v 1.4 2004/02/07 02:19:57 succorso Exp $
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