A fabulous article about the Guardian’s MP expenses crowd sourcing experiment

Fabulous in so many ways, not least that the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts:

• mp expenses
• guardian (not-for-profit org = win!)
• open source
• web frameworks (django, php, ruby on rails, catalyst)
• rapid development
• crowd sourcing
• amazon ec2

On that last point: entire server/hardware cost: £50 (using Amazon ec2) vs “The Guardian has lead time of several weeks to get new hardware”.

And something not explicitly mentioned - really good developers are really worth it. Not just in pay, but in listening to, supporting & giving them a brief, then getting the hell out of the way and letting the sparks fly.

I confess a (very personal) weak spot for the application of IT in media environments. It’s fabulous.

This ought to work for Airport Express devices too, although I’ve not tested it. Ditto it should be similar on a BSD like machine.

On your debian / ubuntu box

• If you have a firewall / iptables setup, enable UDP port 514 from your local network (or at least the IP of the Airport)

• Add the following line to /etc/syslog.conf

  local0.* /var/log/AirPort.log

• To prevent the Airport messages also appearing in /var/log/messages, find the stanza in /etc/syslog.conf that controls that file and add

  !local0.*;\

• Restart your syslog deamon

  sudo /etc/init.d/sysklogd restart

Access the Airport via your Airport Utility

• Advanced tab
• Syslog Destination Address is the IP or hostname of the Debian / Ubuntu linux box that you want to contain the logs. Start with the IP address to get it working, then flip to a hostname if you prefer.

See also AirPort Extreme: Remotely logging base station activity