Preface

Table of Contents

What This Book Contains
How Is This Book Organized?
If You Don't Find Something In This Manual

Log file analysis is both an essential and tedious part of system administration. It is essential because it's the best way of profiling the usage of the service installed on the network. It's tedious because programs generate a lot of data and tools to report on this data are unavailable or incomplete and when such tools exists, they are specific to one product, which means that you can't compare your qmail and Exim mail servers.

Lire is a software package developed by the Stichting LogReport Foundation to generate useful reports from raw log files of various network programs. Multiple programs are supported for various types of network services. Lire also supports various output formats for the generated reports.

What This Book Contains

This book is the Lire User's Manual. It describes how to install, configure and use Lire. The intended audience is system administrators who want to install and use Lire to gather informations about the services operating on their network.

There is another book, the Lire Developer's Manual that is intended for system administrators or programmers that want to extend Lire or want to understand its architecture and design.