using lire-20010629 on RedHat Linux 7.0

[Francis J. Lacoste]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 03:20:43PM +0200, Wytze van der Raay wrote:
> Hello LogReporters,
> 
> Here is some feedback on using the (pre?)release lire-20010629
> on a RedHat Linux 7.1 system.
> 
> First of all, the supplied rpm does not install on this system,
> due to a large number of failed dependencies:
> 

<snip>

> 
> Note that perl-5.6.0-10a is present on this system, which includes
> many (but not all) of the above named perl modules. But the granularity
> by which this is administered in the RH 7.0 RPM database appears to be
> much coarser than lire is assuming.

Oops. I override find.requires and find.provides with one that gives
more granular dependencies. I'm the only doing that, even perl(MODULE)
is supposed to be a RPM conventions. I rebuild the rpm without that
custom automatic dependencies computation.

(Joost, I don't have write access to /pub/rpm, the new rpms are
in /pub. Can you move them under /pub/rpm)

The RPM was also updated to 20010629.1. You might want to check
it another time.

> 
> So back to installing from the lire-20010629.tar.gz image as I was
> used to do anyway :-). Installs fine, but running lr_run as root is
> no longer possible, due to an added test against this in lr_run :-(
> Although I do sympathize with the idea that one should not want to
> run this software as root, reality is that in the RedHat world the
> relevant logfiles like /var/log/messages and /var/log/maillog are
> created and maintained by syslogd as rw------- root/root. This makes
> sense since these files do contain very sensitive information from
> time to time. But it is incompatible with lire's decision to refuse
> processing under the root account ...
> I'd suggest to make it possible to lift this restriction, for example
> by adding a configuration variable for it in /etc/lire/defaults.

I suggest that we change add the following to the error message :

If you need root access to read the logs, you may use su to 
pipe the log to Lire like that :

su -e 'cat /var/log/messages' | lr_run lr_log2report ...

Alternatively, if you don't care about somebody compromising
your system, you may set I_DONT_CARE_ABOUT_SECURITY='yes' in
$HOME/.lirerc to turn off this security check.

What do you think of it ?

> 
> After I patched lr_run, reports were generated nicely as before.
> Since I have the java xalan processor installed, I decided to
> give lire a retry with it. After creating a shell wrapper for
> xalan, the lire config detected it, and started using it.
> Unfortunately, the ascii reports coming out of this were not
> quite the same as the previous ones (without the xalan processing)
> -- the formatting was distinctly poorer in several cases (although
> it's use of .......... lines was more consistent than the noxalan
> version). I'll show some characteristic samples:
> 

<snip>

> 
> Ideally, one should not see any difference between the xalan and
> noxalan versions I think (this may require adjustments on both
> sides though).
> 

This output looks exactly like the one of xsltproc (versions that
don't crash) and Sablotron.

This probably means that the error is the XSL that only works with
Xalan-C (which is nicely broken if that is the case). I'll look into 
that (and add support for xsltproc and sablotron by the way).

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis at Contre.COM
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