I mentioned in a post yesterday that I was watching the syslog of my router to see when it sent a boot image over tftp. However, OpenWRT does not have a “live updating” syslog view – so how was I doing that, just clicking refresh over and over with my third hand, while holding down a reset button with the other two? No, there’s a really easy way to do this with a stupidly simple bash script.

My routers use remote logging to an internal rsyslog server on my LAN, and you’ll see my script is set up to support that. However, this is very easy to modify to support OpenWRT’s default logging, as well.

Without further ado, here’s the script, which lives in my log folder:

#!/bin/sh

# Live log display

while true; do
        tail -n 52 $1
        sleep 5
done

My various consoles I log into this from have anywhere from a 40 to 50 line display set up, hence the “52” – it’s reading and displaying the last 52 lines of the log every five seconds. If you always use shorter consoles, you can easily trim this down.

By passing the name of the script you want to read, this script has also been made “universal” in that it can be used to monitor any log on your machine. I also use it on a couple of my other servers, with no modifications. If you want to monitor “hexenbiest.log” you simply cd into the appropriate log folder, and run:

./loglive hexenbiest.log

Stock OpenWRT doesn’t write the log to a real file, it uses a ring buffer in memory that may be accessed using the command logread. To modify this script to run on a stock OpenWRT router, place it in the home folder (/root/) instead, and modify it to read accordingly:

#!/bin/sh

# Live log display

while true; do
        logread | tail -n 52
        sleep 5
done

This way, instead of reading the last 52 lines of a file every five seconds, it’s reading the last 52 lines of the logread output instead.

You might think it would make sense to clear the terminal before each output, but I didn’t personally find that helpful. In fact, it resulted in a visible flicker every time the log updated. Helpful if you need to know each time it reads, but I didn’t find that useful myself.