I have a laptop, a desktop at home and at work and some Remote Desktop connections to various servers which I must troubleshoot, maintain and use for work. The issue is that people like me (sysadmins and users who use Remote Desktop) are using their msn from multiple computers. You just log in on the remote computer because you get eventually fed up with minimising Remote Desktop connection, answering your chat and then restoring Remote Desktop every time someone sends a message. Usually you end up then having scattered logs in all of those computers. And then you have to search for a telephone number or whatever, and there you go: you need to check at least half a dozen files on three computers, if archiving is turned on, and some computers might be remotely inaccessible sometimes - turned off, for example -. So even separate msn accounts doesn't solve the problem here (and think about adding all your 150 friends to all your accounts
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FTP has some major disadvantages compared to database:
- Inefficiency. Computer has to download the log file, then modify it locally and then upload it again, overwriting the copy on the server. If your network is disconnected while transferring the logfile to FTP server or something else disrupts the FTP session, you will lose your log. As a workaround, you could have a script running periodically in Scheduled Tasks that takes My Chat Logs folder and figures out which files have been updated, compared to files in FTP, and upload only the changed files. But there is still a chance that the script will not synchronize, if you shut down (or crash or what ever) within that 1 minute. Then you chat on some other computer and next time the script activates it either overwrites the chat held on the other computer, or, runs diff with local and remote files and incorporates changes to both of the files. However, this kind of script is not something you would call a piece of cake (and it's messy to set up) and secondly, you would have duplicate log files on all of those computers, which can be a good thing - you can easily find what you're looking for as you normally would, on all of the computers - and it can be a bad thing - if don't have much hard disk space to spare and your logs date back to 2002
- Also, logs would still be text files: you cannot sort nor filter it as you could, would they be in a database. Of course, you would need a mechanism to actually retrieve the log from the database, if phpMyAdmin doesn't satisfy you. But I would gladly hack up a Google-like webpage which would allow me to securely log in, search, filter and sort by whatever all my conversations and never lose my chatlogs again!
An alternative is to create an application which monitors log file dates and when it detects a file change, it parses the date: goes up the log file from the end, line by line, until it gets the "Session date" value, then, checking each line from bottom up against database, imports the lines that are not in database yet. Lot of excessive polling and querying but should work. Only that I don't do binary programming
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