Log View Screensaver

I find it somewhat interesting to keep an eye on this site's access logs. Instead of having to go through the trouble of open an SSH session and manually looking at the log every time, I thought it might be handy to have a program that would automatially run whenever I'm not doing anything with my computer that would display the real-time activity of the site's access log.

Requirements

• A decently modern version of Windows with the .NET Framework 2.0 installed (included in Vista and higher)
• A server to connect to with tail installed. You must be able to connect with a passwordless key file.
• If you want to display country flags next to requests, your logs must be in Common Log Format and you must have a copy of the GeoLite Country Database in binary format (which is free).

Download

Download Log View Screensaver. You can also download the source if you'd like to modify it.

Installation

Simply unzip logview.zip into C:\Windows\System32.

Options

• Host: The hostname or IP of the server containing the log file to monitor. I suppose it could be localhost, but I haven't tried it.
• User: The username you use to log in to the server via SSH.
• Keyfile: The path to your private key. It must not be password-protected.
• Command: The command to execute upon connection to the server. I recommend using tail -f logfile
• Parsing: If your log is in Common Log Format, the program can simplify the request to only show the IP, the request itself, and the referrer. Or, you can choose to display the raw log.
• Fade time: The time it takes for a request to fade completely out. Set this to 0 if you don't want lines to fade out.
• Country flags: You can optionally display country flags next to each request. Log parsing must be enabled, and you must provide a path to a copy of the free GeoLite Country Database in binary format.

Thanks

Thanks to Tamir Gal, whose SharpSSH library made this program possible.

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