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

A bunch of things we’ve found interesting of late:

One of the annoyances we find with using Munin is writing plugins. It’s not hard or complicated per se (or any worse than with any of the other monitoring tools). However it often seems confusing and fiddly to our little brains. We’ll admit we aren’t Munin Experts, nor want to be.

The implementation details we do know tend to leak out of our heads over time as, although we use the reports frequently, we typically don’t fiddle with the guts of Munin very often. Which is perhaps a good thing.

Yet from time to time we need to tinker and it is mostly with the plugins.

Kris Buytaert and Tom De Cooman have posted the slides to their OLS 2008 talk:  “Systems Monitoring Shootout”.

For anyone evaluating monitoring solutions, it is a great read. They’ve obviously done a lot of research and if nothing else highlight a huge bunch of issues and topics you would want to consider when selecting a product.

This is a “quick start” to installing munin on a set of Debian / Ubuntu based servers.It covers just enough to get you started … check the munin documentation for additional things you might want to do.

CNet have a interview with Dave Lilly, GroundWork CEO.

In the same way that Red Hat integrates the Linux kernel and more than 500 open-source components to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux, GroundWork packages, integrates, and documents more than 80 best-of-breed open-source network and systems management projects.

Chris Josephes makes an excellent point about disk usage alerts:

[T]he monitoring system should compare the standard deviation for the file-system percentage over the past 24 hours, and compare it to the standard deviation for the past hour.

It isn’t (just) about what percentage of the file-system is full/free, but how fast it’s filling up. A disk that has sat at 20% full for a year, then creeps up to 50% full in 24 hours …. is that something worth pointing out?

So what else, aside disk, might you want more intelligent monitoring on?