Prophecy 2006

You can also view logs remotely -- that is, you can send everything that appears in the Log Viewer to a remote computer and view the log there, or store it directly in a file.

It's quite simple to set up: from the Management Console, go to the VServer page and enter the name of the remote server under "Syslog server."

Now, the tricky part is that the computer that receives the stream of information must implement the "syslog" protocol. Almost all Linux computers have syslog available, but by default syslog does not accept remote logs (otherwise they'd fill up with spam, no doubt!). You'll have to turn them on.

Now, if you're like me and you want to put all the Prophecy-related information into its own file, the standard, ancient syslog program isn't sophisticated enough to sort through the incoming information. I replaced syslog with syslog-ng, which allows pretty sophisticated filtering, and now all my remote syslog input goes into a distinct file named for that host.

Overall, this is quite convenient. I can use Linux tools to examine, filter, and monitor the stream of incoming information from Prophecy, a big improvement over the "now you see it, now you don't" nature of the Log View text.