Monitoring log files over smb

Question

I am monitoring a couple of windows 2k3 servers from a mac running Os x Lion. I use smb to connect to the server's file system, navigate to the folder where the log files are and open them with console.app.

I like Console.app because it's a dynamic log viewer and it resembles using tail -f option on the terminal. However, over smb I can't get the same behaviour for either Console or the tail command: the updated logs never or very rarely update.

Does anyone know a better way to follow up on a server's log file from the remote mac?

Best regards

Answer 1

The reason for this can be that when server is writing logs ,it writes it to a buffer and this gets written to a file when the buffer gets filled. i.e. You might not see individual logs as and when they are generated.

Also you might want to use smbmount to mount smb share on a local directory and access log file as local file.

Lastly , do a " tail -f " and try stopping the server(properly) and see if you are able to see all the logs at that time.(because at that time it has to write all the logs if they are in a buffer to log file)