Author

My name is Andrey aka KerryT (ru). I am a developer of Screen Squid.

** A bit of history

The idea to create another log analyzer came up with a friend of mine - Corwin. He is a professional system administrator, that is, he makes money from this.

Already then (2009) there were many tools that were clear and convenient for the system administrator - SARG, SAMS, lightsquid, Free-SA .. you can list a lot of them, or you can go to the website http://www.squid-cache.org/Misc/log-analysis.html and see that there are a lot of log analyzers. What they write by all over the world and all the same, something is missing. Most of the programs that are presented in this section are written by the system administrators themselves, such as stubs for their own needs and, with rare exceptions, are written by programmers.
It turned out that the most native to sysadmins is shell scripts, very rarely perl and even less often C / C ++.

Everyone who wrote C / C ++ cross-platform applications of that time simply died on application support. Because the world is huge and the number of systems on which the software is installed is even greater. And this is not strictly Debian, but a wide variety of *nix distributions.
It turned out that, having released the release, the developer hastily made patches to make the new release work on most platforms. And most importantly, simple system administrators could be updated. They are great specialists in their field, but programmers are bad. Therefore, the installation and updates process is better to be the same and without surprises. And if there is a step-by-step instruction, this is generally awesome.

Having studied the current situation, it turned out that the existing log analyzers work with files understandable by system administrators. I ran the script, got a dozen files. And if you didn’t receive it, then something went wrong. I decided to work differently - upload data to the database and from there already generate reports on the fly. The system administrator only needs to install Perl, MySQL (MariaDB) and deploy a web server with PHP. It seemed to me that it would be faster and more convenient, and most importantly - cross-platform. The first steps in mastering MySQL led to Screen Squid v0.01 - 0.06. These were very, very buggy versions. In addition to working slowly, we also had to set up the base. In general, my main customer, Corwin, said it was inconvenient and I took a timeout of a year to pump skills of firing from a machine gun. After that, the formation of Screen Squid began with version v1.0. Its main difference was that it is faster than all analogues. The database schema has not changed much since then, and the functionality has been growing. Thanks to users, I managed to add a lot of features and fix bugs. The code is written simply, so even on the www.habr.com there is an article on how to integrate into Screen Squid for additional functionality. There is other evidence that people built in without much trouble.

When somebody ask me if my product is Screen Squid, I answer - No, this is the product of everyone who created tickets with features and bugs. Each of them can say that he had his hand in the coolness of Screen Squid.

** What if you have an idea for developing a new feature? Or a new program.

Write us at t.me/screensquid, let's discuss.