On Generation of Firewall Log Status Reporter (SRr) Using Perl

TL;DR

This paper presents a Perl-based utility called SRr that automates the generation of firewall log reports, aiding system administrators in monitoring network security and potentially serving broader text and data mining applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces a generalized, customizable Perl utility for generating firewall log reports, enhancing log analysis efficiency and applicability in bioinformatics.

Findings

SRr enables quick report generation from large log files.

It helps trace request sources, destinations, and errors efficiently.

The utility is adaptable for text and data mining in bioinformatics.

Abstract

Computer System Administration and Network Administration are few such areas where Practical Extraction Reporting Language (Perl) has robust utilization these days apart from Bioinformatics. The key role of a System/Network Administrator is to monitor log files. Log file are updated every day. To scan the summary of large log files and to quickly determine if there is anything wrong with the server or network we develop a Firewall Log Status Reporter (SRr). SRr helps to generate the reports based on the parameters of interest. SRr provides the facility to admin to generate the individual firewall report or all reports in one go. By scrutinizing the results of the reports admin can trace how many times a particular request has been made from which source to which destination and can track the errors easily. Perl scripts can be seen as the UNIX script replacement in future arena and SRr is one development with the same hope that we can believe in. SRr is a generalized and customizable utility completely written in Perl and may be used for text mining and data mining application in Bioinformatics research and development too.