Chapter 3. Running Lire

Table of Contents

Lire's configuration system
Getting Started
Using A Responder
Generating A Report From A Log File
Selecting Output Format
Including Charts in the Report
Merging Reports
Manual Merging
Automating Merging using cron: some ideas
Gotchas
Sending Anonymized Log Files To A Responder
Processing The Responder's Results
Running Lire In A Server Cluster
Using Mail

This chapter describes the various ways that you can use Lire to process log files to generate reports. The next chapter (Chapter 4, Automating Lire) explains how you can set up your system to process your log files automatically at regular interval.

Lire's configuration system

Lire's configuration is spread over several files. These files are pulled from different locations, each with a different purpose.

prefix/share/lire/defaults/

This configuration directory contains configuration files of Lire and any various third-party components you may have installed. You should not edit these files, modifications will be overwritten during an upgrade of Lire or those third-party components.

~/.lire/config.xml

This is the configuration file where your customized configuration is stored.

The configuration of a lire session is build up first from the files found in the defaults directory and the user configuration file in the end.

Getting Started

To start configuring Lire, simply fire up lire from a terminal and select the Lire->Preferences menu. Initially all values will be unset so that only defaults are used. If you want to override a default all you need to do is set the value.

If a value is invalid for a given variable, a message will be displayed next to the widget holding the erroneous configuration variable. Such variables will be ignored when Lire runs and the defaults will be used instead.

Your customized configuration file will only be saved if you press the OK button. Otherwise the changes will be ignored, as you would normally expect.