"Welcome to yet another article in the series of articles dedicated to basic system maintenace and security. This time, I plan to cover the topic of logging, and why is logging a must for every serious admin, or for any system . . .
"Welcome to yet another article in the series of articles dedicated to basic system maintenace and security. This time, I plan to cover the topic of logging, and why is logging a must for every serious admin, or for any system that plans to be exposed to any kind of multi user enviroment. Before I go on further, a small suggestion you should take seriously, no matter if you plan reading or just skimming through the introduction: log everything! Yes, be paranoid, log everything you can. Now that I have said that, let's discuss it altogether...

One of the main advantages of linux and other multi user systems is the logging ability. What is logging exactly? It is merely a process of creating logs, documenting and storing certain system or user activity for various reasons. Entire process and idea of logging probably came from programming, where it was useful to record events, such as program behaviour for further development, and to collect such information for future diagnostic and improvement. Same is with logging on the system level. It is, to say the least, useful to log all activities and events that took place on your system for future analysis. From a security point of view, logging serves as a proof of malicious activity or as an indicator of a potential one. Now, with linux, by default, you are equipped with a several different logging tools and utilities."

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