Statement of Intent

We are in the process of rolling out an installation of ckl, a fork of the CloudKick logging tool, to each host we manage (virtual or otherwise). The purpose of the rollout is to provide a voluntary logging system for Unix adminstration tasks performed by folks with root priviledges. Prior to the ckl rollout the Infrastructure Team had very little visibility into what goes on admin-wise with many of our hosts, and we hope you'll help us change that by adopting ckl into your workflow.

Current Status

We have installed ckl on all our FreeBSD-based hosts, including our jails. Later we will be installing it on our Linux-based hosts and virtual machines, and finally on our remaining Solaris hosts.

Code

The fork is available at https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/infrastructure/trunk/projects/ckl. Patches and new feature requests may be posted to the INFRA jira.

Endpoint

Our ckl endpoint is currently available from apache.org hosts only at http://monitoring.apache.org/ckl/. A publicly-viewable test endpoint is available at http://monitoring.apache.org/ckl2/.

Usage

The typical usage pattern for ckl is to launch a session with

$ ckl save -s

This will cause ckl to spawn a shell whose screen output will be captured in a logfile to be sent to the ckl endpoint. Do your administrative tasks within this shell, being careful not to have your password echoed back to you as that will obviously get logged. Once you are done, exit the shell either by typing exit or by closing the input descriptor via Ctrl-D.

This will cause ckl to open an editor session using your EDITOR env variable, so you may write a suitable log message describing your work. Once the message has been saved and the editor closed, ckl will submit your data to the endpoint for storage and eventual peer review.

To review the recent activity on a host, you may either visit the endpoint on the web or log into the host and run the ckl command.

$ ckl list -l 5

will list the last 5 log entries for the current host (passing -H host will allow you to view other host logs).

$ ckl cat -l 3

will print out the log + typescript output of the 3 most recent entries for the current host.

The list of available options can be seen by running

$ ckl -h