As the admin of a very small HVAC company, every day of my life I get hundreds or thousands of syslog messages from the company firewall - a PIX-506E that I installed and manage. Sure, I could go look up the messages on Cisco's website(s) or paste them into Google, but what fun is that? It would be really nice to have my own simple website textbox where I paste the error message in, hit enter, and then a new page is displayed with the Cisco explanation at the top and the Google results below (without using frames).

As you are likely well aware, there are eight syslog message levels: Emerg, Alert, Critical, Error, Warning, Notice, Info, Debug. I keep Info and Debug turned off most of the time to reduce traffic and general noise. For this project, each message level would have its own MySQL table, and either the URL of the error message code at Cisco or the actual message explanation and recommended action would be stored.

The tricks to getting this to work include my:

1. Learning how to make PHP interoperate with MySQL successfully.
2. Parsing the Cisco pages for data (versus manually typing thousands of message explanations and actions into the tables).
3. Redirecting a Google search's output into my own webpage.

I don't know how to do any of this already, and although I may be biting off much more than I can chew, the idea of trying something that will be hard and perhaps not completely successful is more interesting than selecting something that I already know I can do. I'll likely need help along the way. With that in mind, your thoughts and ideas are anticipated and much appreciated.

Joel Pippin
joel at email dot unc dot edu