Agent Smith
Explains Syslog


Agent Smith receives a message from Cisco CEO John Chambers…

Here at RouterGod Online Magazine we recognize that Cisco routers have evolved well past the point of being simple routing appliances.  Cisco routers have recently been classified as life forms by the National Institute of Science.  As Cisco Engineers, we’ve long known that our little forest green friends were sentient beings.  Cisco is busy making revolutionary strides developing a new method of configuring routers that involves plugging a console cable into a special port in the back of an engineer’s head, and then the engineer can configure the router by interacting with a virtual character that represents the IOS.  All CCIEs with numbers higher than 9918 have this special port in the back of their head.  We sent RouterGod Technical Editor Jenny Vo to San Jose to have the port installed in her head and try out the new interface.  She chose the popular Agent Smith interface (only available in T trains) and decided to test it out by configuring Syslog.  Let’s Join Jenny as she interacts with Cisco’s new interface!




 

Have you ever stood and stared at it, Jenny? Marveled at its beauty. Its genius. Billions of people just living out their lives… oblivious

 

 

 

 

 

Logging Levels

level verbose explanation
0 emerg system is unusable
1 alert action must be taken immediately
2 crit the system is in a critical condition
3 err there is an error condition
4 warning there is a warning condition
5 notice a normal but significant condition
6 info a purely informational message
7 debug messages generated to debug the application

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Agent Smith adjusts a Windows
2000 Server.

 

 

 

 

Nortel Routers are a disease, a cancer of this planet. They are a plague. And we are… the cure.

 

Jenny Vo

Oh wow!  This is pretty neat!  You must be Agent Smith, the avatar that Cisco’s IOS uses in upcoming releases.

Agent Smith

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I’ve realized that CCNAs are not actually mammals.

Jenny Vo

Tell me something I don’t know!  Whatever, explain to me what SYSLOG is, after all that’s why I’m here.

Agent Smith

Very well, Jenny Vo.  Syslog is simply a messaging utility.  It’s off by default on Cisco routers.  The router con be configured to send messages to a host on the network that is running syslog software, this software enables the host to capture and store the messages.

Jenny Vo

So the router sends messages to a syslog server, what protocol does it use to send these messages?

Agent Smith

These messages are sent using UDP, the destination port is 514

Jenny Vo

OK, great.  How do you tell the router where the server is?

Agent Smith

You must type in a command at global config mode. Assume that the server is at 10.1.1.1

matrix(config)# logging host 10.1.1.1

Jenny Vo

OK, now that’s easy, what’s next?

Agent Smith

You must select a logging level.  You must be careful here, it is easy to generate huge logs that will be difficult to examine later.  You can choose from eight levels of messaging.  For example level 7 will send debugging messages to the server.  When you select level 7 logging you also get logging at all levels below 7, so that can be a lot of syslog messages to look at.  Here is how you would log informational messages:

zion_mainframe(config)# logging trap 6

Jenny Vo

Okie dokie, so that’s it?  Just 2 commands?

Agent Smith

Not quite Jenny Vo, you must turn on logging with this command:

taketheredpill(config)# logging on

Jenny Vo

Now I see, there’s a minimum of 3 commands: logging trap, logging host and logging on!  What else is there to know about logging?

Agent Smith

Where to start?  Well, logging is enabled by default to the console port, you can turn it off with the no logging console command.

Jenny Vo

I heard a rumor that you could actually store logging messages in DRAM, is that true?

Agent Smith

Yes, you can log messages into DRAM, the command to log messages at level 7 (debugging) would be:

ilovetrinity(config)# logging buffered

Jenny Vo

Very Cool, how do you view the logging messages?

Agent Smith

Use the same command you use to view logging information in general:

krasher# show logging

Jenny Vo

Well Agent Smith, this has been really great, I can’t wait until all Cisco products use the Virtual Reality Interface, and thank you for explaining syslog.

Agent Smith

Think nothing of it, now we’ll put your body back in the power plant.

Jenny Vo

Huh?

 

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