Preface
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## Preface

Log file analysis is both an essential and tedious part of system administration. It is essential because it's the best way of profiling the usage of the service installed on the network. It's tedious because programs generate a lot of data and tools to report on this data are often unavailable or incomplete. When such tools exist, they are generally specific to one product, which means that you can't compare e.g. your Qmail™ and Exim™ mail servers.

Lire is a software package developed by the Stichting LogReport Foundation to generate useful reports from raw log files of various network programs. Multiple programs are supported for various types of network services. Lire also supports various output formats for the generated reports.

## What This Book Contains

This book is the Lire Developer's Manual. Its purpose is to present Lire as a log analysis framework. To this ends, it describes the architecture and design of Lire and contains comprehensive instructions on how to use it. Its intended audience is system administrators or programmers who want to extend Lire or want to understand its internals.

There is another book, the Lire User's Manual which describes how to install, configure and use Lire, as a “off-the-shelf” log analyzer. Its intended audience is system administrators who want to install and use Lire to gather information about the services operating on their network.

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