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

Take a default Ubuntu/Debian install using the Mutt mail client (MUA) then switch to exim4.

You get the most monumental FAIL - your bcc addresses will be included in the message to everyone else. Dangerous and embarrassing!

Happily there is a fix, but it seems insane that you should even need it. Read on for details.

Back after a short relapse and a move to a new server.

A few links to stuff that’s interested us of late:

• Secure password management using CPM. I’ve used ccrypt in the past along with a liberal sprinkle of grep and some wrappers in bash.
• Does the gmail train ever stop? Offline Gmail (along with some interesting hax0r vectors) and a hint that they might be trying PGP in Gmail. How nice would it be if my mum could get PGP email sigs without having to worry about all the nerdy details?
• One of Google Chrome’s natty features is DNS Prefetching and now, if you don’t mind having to login first, you can get a DNS prefetch extension for firefox too. We’ve been getting good mileage out of OpenDNS too of recent. It whips the ass of our (otherwise, pretty savy) isps offering. Our only niggle is that OpenDNS proxy google search pages which is vexing. That said, register a free account and you can customise the DNS settings for your ip address and, I believe, disable the google proxying.
• The consistently enjoyable High Scalability blog has a post about Facebook’s Cassandra. Yet another distributed data store solution, but on the surface, looks like it may be a decent contender.

Some top picks from the last few days:A good overview and comparison of various Virtualization technologies from the ever interesting Kris Buytaert.The High Scalability blog pulls together a list of places that are discussing the state of the art in scaling in the cloud. Not entirely un-related is High Scalability’s overview of the Second Life Architecture. 12Gbit/sec in 2007 and growing huh?The Bend in the Weather blog covers how to setup your networking in VirtualBox.Enjoy! Comments or email always welcome.

What technology platforms do the big boys run (Digg, ebay, Amazon and YouTube)?What architectures do they use?What tips and lessons can they share?twit88.com has the details.

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.

Interesting article from Edd Dumbill :

… the cost of infrastructure has dropped … other costs remain high … System administrators … demand high wages. Commercial software license fees spiral out of control … power is already troubling large companies …Help is at hand … If they don’t yet make massive resource management trivial, they at least make it possible.

In short, if you want to be ahead of the curve, you want to be ahead of the curve with these technologies:

• Distributed revision control systems
• Virtualization
• Configuration management

… because they let you do more with less. Pleasingly, we’re already making heavy use of the first two and had started scratching our heads about the last one.