Zadikem, Travis-taz wrote:

> But why download something and massage it when you should
> just be able to go to one place and get the information you need, right?
> If I am at home and someone calls me with a problem with access. I should
> be able to login to my m0n0wall at work and check the log right there.  I shouldn't
> have to log into a second machine, check my new fancy log and then log back
> into m0n0wall to fix a possible problem.  Hmm!

I must agree with Mr. Zadikem here, even if I do understand that the 
developers might have a lot of more important things to do with their 
time ;)

It is of course always possible to use either the SNMP or the syslog 
feature (or both), to obtain the needed information and format it as 
wanted. However, this requires a seperate box on which to do such 
formatting (and, it follows, the final presentation of the formatted 
logs), and as have been discussed so many times before, not everybody 
has this option, nor would it make sense to set up a box just for this 
purpose for a great number of users (such as myself! Being a home 
user, having a stand-alone syslog box would be extreme overkill in my 
case.)

Personally I also find that the suggestion of using one or more Java 
applets to do such formatting would be overdoing things a bit. As 
first suggested, all that is really needed is some textual formatting 
(converting/expanding the various codes, rule numbers and so on into a 
more "human-readable" format), a bit of colouring (both for easy 
identification of the various parts of a log entry, and for indicating 
various kinds of entries) and (optionally) a few icons (as an 
alternate way of indicating the kind of entry, such as "block", "pass" 
and "reject" etc.) This should all (to my limited knowledge?) be quite 
doable using only php (and perhaps a small binary, to speed things up 
if necessary?)

Of course it would also be nice if IPs were resolved to host names and 
perhaps even "resolving" known ports, both of which should also not be 
too hard to do in php, but such might well be considered "too much" 
for the built-in log (and might also require a large DNS cache and/or 
multi-threaded DNS lookup and other stuff, beyond the current 
capabilites of m0n0wall?)

Anyway, just my 2c on the matter. I'll leave it up to the developers 
to decide if this is something that warrants immidiate attention, or 
should be put in the "perhaps later" drawer?


Regards,

Adam.