talk sysadmin to me <3
Okay. So today I’ve been working on a monitoring solution for our network. Easy, right? Just receive files and read them
Except it’s not. I set up my receiving correctly, set up the log parsing correctly, set up all of my sorting correctly. The ports are open, the firewall rules are in place, the system is doing its thing. But as the other coworkers on my team are trying to add stuff to my monitoring system, they’re having problems with the receiving. No problem, I’ll handle it. But the most entitled, angry cishet man is one of my coworkers and he’s trying to ask how to navigate a dashboard to read logs while I’m trying to fix a syntax error, and all the while he’s carrying on another conversation across me while I’m trying to get help from the nice old man who works with us to track down what the right syntax is. Too many conversations, but I end up working out a syntax change for template application in rsyslog 8.17 that’s different from 8.14 and solve it with rainerscript. Easy.
But then, angry coworker says his system should be sending logs and asks if I’m getting them. I’m not seeing them in my dashboard, so I dig a little more. I have the files, but they’re not parsing - had to be an issue with reading folders recursively, right? So I change the folder structure. I spend two and a half hours trying different ones. Nothing. So I’m sitting here stumped, I go back and read the logs from his machine, reference 8 year old forum posts, and on accident because I wanted to look at one of the logs parsed earlier this morning I change the time scope from “last 2 hours” to “today” and I find our issue. Lo and behold…
My stuff worked the whole time. His server time is 3 hours ahead so it wasn’t displaying because it’s not that time yet.
