Version 2.3.9 of elog has been released today. Enhancements are:

- Added options "Use Lock", "Title image"

- New "Email format" specifies what is sent exactly in an email 
notification. This may now include also attachments

- "Format <attribute>" lets you assign separate style sheet classes to each 
attribute, making the web display more powerful (see this forum, 
the "subject" uses a separate formatting). Note that this feature requires 
an update of the old "default.css" CSS file, if a elog version prior to 
2.3.9 is already installed on a system.

- "Execute new/edit/delete" lets one execute shell commands on the server 
side for new, edited or deleted messages. Since this can cause security 
problems, a new flag "-x" has been added to the elogd daemon to enable this 
feature. It can be used to synchronize the elog database with other 
databases, or to send SMS messages to people.

- New "Logging level" option gives enhanced logging capabilities, including 
read and write access logging to individual elog entries.

- The elog utility can now edit existing messages, and correctly quotes 
messages with "> " on replies.

A few small bugs have been fixed, refer to the ChangeLog for more details.

> Short of manually editing the logbook files, is there a way I can change the
> date of an entry?  I want to transfer my "Linux Journal", which I have been
> writing as a regular document for several months, into elog so I can take
> advantage of the threading, sorting, find, etc.

You cannot change the entry date, since this is kind of system stamp which 
should not be modified. But you can add an attribute like "Issue" for your 
Linux Journal, where you can add manually the month and year of release or so. 
Then you can preset this attribute with the current date, which you can change 
for older issues, like

Attributes = ...., Issue
Preset Issue = $date
Date format = %B %Y

Hope this helps.

- Stefan

> I figured out how to hide columns, using the "Display search" parameter.  (BTW,
> suggest you modify the Administrator manual to mention that "Display search" applies
>   to the initial display as well as any "Find"s.  I had seen this, but assumed it
> only applied to actual search results.) 

Fully agree. The name comes from historical reasons. I renamed "Display search" 
to "List Display". Will come in the next version.

> Still have not figured out how to change
> the default sort attribute however.

There is a little trick to do that:

Start page = ?rsort=Issue

Since sorting is done only lexically, you need a special date format like

Date format = %Y %m %d

in order to sort correctly.

> Can you give a syntax example of the Logging Level option ?

Please refer to the documentation (http://midas.psi.ch/elog/config.html), I just 
updated it. "Logging Level = 3" is the maximum level which includes writes and 
reads.

> It appears Im having problems getting this to work, my config is as follows, yet 
> its not updating the log file since i installed the new RPM 2.3.9, is there a 
> problem or am I doing something wrong ?

Oops, there was a bug. I added the resource directory in front of the logfile name, 
which is not correct if the logfile name contains an absolute path. I fixed that in 
the current CVS version. As a temporary fix, remove the resource dir in your elogd.cfg 
or remove the full path in the logfile (the file will the be put into the resource dir 
of course...).

> I tried to add a file with the  "Bottom text = <file>" option.
> 
> Although one would suggest that the bottom text file is included in every 
> page, I only saw the file appear in the page that appears when you issue 
> the "cmd=Edit" command.

That's really weired. The file is displayed at the bottom of single messages, 
and the message list, but NOT at the form, which you reach with the "Edit" 
command. So all I can suggest ist the following:

- Hit the reload button on your browser each time you change that file, to 
make sure the browser does not display a page from its cache

- The HTML file is *included* in the normal page, so it should not contain 
<HTML> or <BODY> tags. Start with a simple file containing something like

<center>Test</center>

and see what you get.

- Make sure the file is in the elog "resource" directory, which gets 
displayed if you start elogd with the "-v" flag.

Let me know if any of this helped.

> opps nevermind, i didn't realize I had to put something in for the ending 
> body text.  Anyway to skip that part?
> 
> > elog -h 192.168.0.25 -p 80 -l Database -a Type=test1 -a OS=W2K -a Loc=room1
> > -a Status=operational
> > 
> > doing anything wrong here?

Due to frequent requests, the elog utility reads the message body text from the 
console (stdin), if it's missing on the command line (like in your case). Under 
Linux, you can then pipe some text into elog

cat message.txt | elog -h ...

or under Windows

type message.txt | elog -h ...

If you enter the text directly, you have to finish it with Ctrl-Z / Return
(Windows) or Ctrl-D (Linux). If you do not want any text, you can write

elog -h .... -a Status=operational " "

to submit an empty text (well, almost empty, contains single blank).

I was thinking since some time already about mirroring between elog servers, 
and actually started already some implementation.

The problem with mirroring on the file level does not work. Assume two 
servers "serv1" and "serv2". Then assume that one message gets submitted on 
serv1 and at the same day another message gets submitted on serv2. Now you 
have on both servers a file 030726a.log, but you cannot copy this file 
simply from one server to the other, since you would overwrite the message 
submitted on the other server. Furthermore, you need file level access, 
which is maybe easy between your laptop and your desktop computer, but not 
if the two mirror servers are in different countries. Like in our 
collaboration we have three servers located in Switzerland, Italy and Japan 
(meg.psi.ch, meg.pi.infn.it, meg.icepp.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp), where we cannot 
have direct disk access.

So what I propose is the following mirror scheme:

o Each elog server may contain a list of mirror servers in the configuration 
file

o Each elog server calculates an MD5 checksum from all local messages

o Synchronization between servers can be triggered manually (by clicking 
on "Synchronize") or automatically at a given time and interval

o On Synchronization, the elogd server fetches the MD5 list from the mirror 
server and compares it with the local list

o If a message has been edited remotely but not locally, it's fetched and 
stored locally, same in the other direction

o If a message got edited on both sides since the last synchronization, the 
user is asked to resolve the conflict (keep local or keep remote message)

o If there is a new message locally, its submitted at the remote server, but 
with the same submission date/time as locally, same in the other direction

o If new messages are present on both sides, their message ID is changed so 
that it is unique, then they are copied over. If there are already replies 
to this message, their link (using the message ID) is changed accordingly

So I plan to implement this scheme in the next time. The MD5 checksum is 
already there. If anybody has comments or additional wishes concerning 
mirroring, telling them right now would be great, since I then can 
accomodate them easier during the implementation.

- Stefan