mac geekery

Answer

You’ll want to write scripts to gather the information you need, then log that information, and then convert that log to RSS. Happily, most of this is already done for you.

We can use one of the various local facilities for this purpose. They range from local0 to local7 with local0 in use by the system for the firewall logger. We’ll take over the local7 facility for this project. Append the following line to /etc/syslog.conf:

local7.*  /var/log/events

Then HUP syslogd to activate the new log:

sudo killall -HUP syslogd

Test with the following command, which should put a log line in /var/log/events:

logger -p local7.notice foo

Now you’ll need to setup a script like the following to do the testing, logging on failures:

#!/bin/bash
if ! ping -o bob.local
then
        logger -p local7.notice Could not contact bob.local
fi

Set that to run periodically with cron or launchd or whatnot. Then, at some interval, run the log2rss.pl script we covered previously on the /var/log/events log and then publish and subscribe to that RSS feed (either locally, or by saving to someone’s Sites folder and using Personal Web Sharing).

Voila, a feed of system events that you control.