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weismat
Asked: 2010-09-16 23:17:09 +0800 CST

Windows - How to remotely watch log files

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I would like to look at some log files solely via the console on a standard Windows 7 machine. The logs are created by schedulded tasks and I find it a hazzle to use VNC for this purpose.
What technology should I look at? Powershell, Cygwin via ssh or something else? The log files are written using log4Net - thus there might also be an easy way to reconfigure it to create events or something else for remote display.

windows remote-access console

3 Answers

  1. In PowerShell, there is an arguably effective method. powershell -c "get-content \path\to\your\log\name.log -wait". The last parameter is important. I use this all the time in Windows 7 and to watch files remotely from a Windows 7/2k8 box on older versions of the OS. I tried to find old info that says PS versions < 2 had performance problems with this, but it has worked very reliably for me.

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  2. Ok - the easiest and cleanest way is to use the Telnet appender for log4Net.

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  3. I'm not sure what you mean by "Console". Console can mean just about anything. The CMD.exe and Powershell window are text-based Consoles, while MMC (and all of it's snap-ins) are GUI-based consoles.

    If you want to use the GUI, open Event Viewer from the Administrative tools or open MMC.exe (it helps to run it as a user with admin access - I prefer using runas /user:domain\adminusername mmc) and add the Event Viewer Snap-In. At the root of Event Viewer where it says "Event Viewer (Local)", right-click and select "Connect to another computer...", enter the target computer name, and voila! You can now view the other computer's Event Logs as if you were sitting at that machine.

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