GUI notifications from syslog

[Tom Metro]

Anyone know of an existing solution or common approach for getting GUI 
notifications from syslog? For example, configuring syslog to do 
something with critical priority messages that results in them getting 
displayed on the machine's desktop.

It should be easy enough to hack something together by having syslog 
write to a named pipe and then using a shell script to read from it and 
invoke a command line interface to libnotify[1] or with some Perl 
glue[2], but I figure this is something that's been solved before.

I'm thinking of using broadcast syslog as a way of communicating 
critical notifications on my LAN, and the above would complete the 
presentation side of that. I had been using a peer-to-peer messaging 
protocol for this sort of thing, but it has to be aimed at a specific 
recipient host, which doesn't work if you need to have multiple 
recipients. Jabber could work, but that introduces an added dependency 
on a working Jabber server.

1. http://www.galago-project.org/news/index.php
2. http://search.cpan.org/~flora/Gtk2-Notify-0.05/lib/Gtk2/Notify.pm

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/