Recently in Log Processing Category

Being a sendmail guy, I was wondering if qmail had any mail log parser. I came across qmailanalog but then, it came with no useful docs on using it. I got some info on the net, and this is how you do it.

#!/bin/sh
#
PATH=/usr/local/qmailanalog/bin:/var/qmail/bin:$PATH
MAILLOG="/var/log/maillog"
QMAILLOG="/tmp/qmail.$$"
/usr/bin/awk '{$1="";$2="";$3="";$4="";$5="";print}' < $MAILLOG | matchup > $QMAILLOG
(
echo "To: rampras@domain.com"
echo "From: ram@domain.com"
echo "Subject: maillog"
echo ""
./zoverall < $QMAILLOG
./zfailures < $QMAILLOG
./zdeferrals < $QMAILLOG
./recipients < $QMAILLOG
./senders < $QMAILLOG) | qmail-inject -f ram@domain.com
rm -f $QMAILLOG

This produces a very nice summary like the following:

Basic statistics

qtime is the time spent by a message in the queue.

ddelay is the latency for a successful delivery to one recipient---the
end of successful delivery, minus the time when the message was queued.

xdelay is the latency for a delivery attempt---the time when the attempt
finished, minus the time when it started. The average concurrency is the
total xdelay for all deliveries divided by the time span; this is a good
measure of how busy the mailer is.

Completed messages: 181
Recipients for completed messages: 234
Total delivery attempts for completed messages: 235
Average delivery attempts per completed message: 1.29834
Bytes in completed messages: 1651675
Bytes weighted by success: 1724065
Average message qtime (s): 2.6932

Total delivery attempts: 242
success: 220
failure: 14
deferral: 8
Total ddelay (s): 495.335359
Average ddelay per success (s): 2.251524
Total xdelay (s): 521.833090
Average xdelay per delivery attempt (s): 2.156335
Time span (days): 1.59635
Average concurrency: 0.00378347
Reasons for failure
..................
..................
..................
One line per reason for delivery failure. Information on each line:
* del is the number of deliveries that ended for this reason.
* xdelay is the total xdelay on those deliveries.
..............
..............
..............

If you get an error saying

/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:

error: error reading top line of /var/lib/logrotate.status

delete /var/lib/logrotate.status, and then run logrotate once with -f flag, like

 #> logrotate -f /etc/logrorate.d/syslog

This should initialize the status file and the error should not be repeating.

I had this requirement for moving/deleting the old bin log files of mysql from my server since they were hogging too much of the server space. I wrote this small script (might need polishing) to do the work.

Check it out and send me your feedback.