I'm looking for some advice on best/common practices with writing a log for a game server I wrote in Java (first time with server/client concept and I've never done anything with logging). I've tried some Googling, but the keywords involved are kind of vague and not coming up with any answers to my questions.
I have a server with users, game lobbies, and games. I think that I should create a log to keep a history of everything that happens on the server. And in this log I think I should record status changes of both the server itself (startup, shutdown, commands being processed), and socket connections (new/lost clients, incoming/outgoing messages).
I'm not sure if that's the best thing to do, or instead/also have a log with more human readable messages like "Bob781 joined lobby #4." or "microman12 beat sun44 in a game."
Should I write logs to the console or to a file? (2 separate files?)
What formats are best or most commonly used? Should they be the same formats?
I've come across the "Common Log Format", is this the best format choice for socket connections? Can it be used for the server statuses?
Should I use something in java.util.logging or just output the strings myself?
You always want to look for existing solutions before starting from scratch. When you use/create the logging, I would suggest the following tips based on my experience
Make sure you can reliable retrieve the logs whenever you might need them.
Make it easy to find a log file based on what you're looking for. For example if there is a problem with a specific game lobby, you should be able to easily navigate to the file or directory of files that pertain to that game lobby in question. Nothing worse than having to parse a huge gigantic log file...
Make each logging message meaningful. Don't just log stuff for the sake of logging. You will want to be able to read a log message and know relatively where in the server code that message is coming from. This will help later down the road when you run into bugs in your server code.
Have each log message time stamped at the point it's created and not when it's written to the log file.
Related
I am trying to elaborate SIP messages coming to an Asterisk server and edit them on the fly using Java.
AMI is supposed to work fine with that. Although I can't send any SIP messages though the socket, cause every-time I tried to edit chan_sip.c the server breaks down. So I haven't find a way to access this information from other classes of the manager. I don't want to save those information to a file or database cause this will delay the whole process.
Using Kamailio is not an option cause I want to make a comparison of both solutions so I need Asterisk.
Is there any path I should follow to get this done? I can't figure why editing chan_sip.c bothers Asterisk making him nonfunctional..
Seams like no way with your qualification. Task seams really complex for me(i have more then 10 years experience, including asteirsk internal and c/c++ programming).Try do that using dialplan only
I'm currently working on an App, which writes millions of lines to logcat (debugging output). I catch all these Informations (at runtime) by filtering the logoutput (of logcat) and write all the information in a file (redirect locat to a file). Unfortunately this takes very long and therefore the app runs very slow.
Now I wanted to ask, if there is a way, how i could get all these information faster. Is it faster, instead of writing the debugging information to logcat, to directly write the information to a textfile (on the device), or does anyone know a better way to gather these lines more efficient??!.
Thanks for reading,
greetings B.
There exist multiple logging tools. I recommend having a look at Timber trees.
But please listen on Jake Wharton:
Every time you log in production, a puppy dies.
Here is a list of logger tools from awesome-android:
logger - Simple, pretty and powerful logger for android
timber - A logger with a small, extensible API which provides utility on top of Android's normal Log class.
LoggingInterceptor - An OkHttp interceptor which pretty logs request and response data.
Bugfender - Upload your logs and check them online, specially made for mobile
EzyLogger - Simple Lightweight logger
Logback Android - Logback port to Android which provides a highly configurable logging framework for Android apps.
Punt - cli tool that makes adb logcat better
I am writing a plugin for the popular Minecraft server software, Bukkit.
My plugin will require sending player scores to my server, to work out a global leaderboard.
Seeing as Java can be decompiled, someone can decompile the plugin, and find out how it works (It's open source anyway). I am looking for a method of sending data to my server (player scores), in such a way so it can not be spoofed, and the leaderboards cannot be rigged.
I was considering making the plugin's users (server owners) sign up to the leaderboards site, and then use their own username/password combination to connect to my leaderboards. If it was abused, I could simply block that server from the leaderboards. This is not the most efficient method however, as I would have to administrate the joins and approve the amount of kills.
How would I go about making sure the client (Bukkit Server Plugin) can't spoof kills?
If your concern is that a legitimate user is educated enough to decompile your jar, understand your code and figure out how to send wrong data from your plugin, authentication methods are of no use (the user is already legitimate) and I assume the logic that calculates what you want can not reside in the server. In this case your best option would be to obfuscate your code
Making it open source is what's stopping you. If it was closed source you could obfuscate your jar and it would be much harder to decompile your code.
If you still want it to be open source, you could keep an eye on rapidly growing servers or very high scored servers. But like you said, that's very inefficient.
Post on the Bukkit forums, they might have a better answer for you.
I am to develop a mobile application for the Java ME platform that sends SMS messages, containing binary data. However, the application is to use a custom port for sending these messages (so that it can register itself and automatically receive these messages, instead of the standard messaging system of the phone).
My question is:
1) Are BinaryMessages to custom port widely supported in mobile networks worldwide? Or is this something "extravagant" that would work only with a few telecom operators?
2) Normal TextMessages tend to be broken down to multiple parts when their text exceeds the limit of a single message. Are BinaryMessages treated the same way, and if so, how can I deal with this issue (fragmentation) in my application? Obviously part of the message will not do the work and ideally I would like to get the full message when all of its parts are received. Is this dependent on the carrier network?
I realize I could test this out, but I can't run the test on many telecoms, just those in my (small) country, and this is crucial to whether this application should be developed, or not.
I tried looking for the answers by myself, but I failed. Sorry if these are trivial questions and thank you for your time.
I see nothing wrong with this question. I can only offer a semi-answer though.
It is true that it is up to the individual network provider to choose whether they want to keep all ports open, or not. Therefor you cannot assume that it's always possible to send/receive a text message or a binary message.
However, I was told by another JavaME developer long time ago, that it's very unusual for them to close the ports. (Aren't the same ports used for a lot of other protocols such as sockets and http? If yes, then surely they are always open. Closing them wouldn't make any sense).
If I were you I'd add some code to check if messages are sent, and then output some error message to the user about it if it fails. (If possible, also call some URL as a way of error-reporting back to you).
About the broken down messages, that's a good question. I have no idea. I would make some real-device tests to find out.
i'm trying to write a java program to read everything I post to a certain website (facebook in this case), I'm trying to make a program to save my ongoing chat to text, I can find the POST in fiddler, but how do I read it in java? I didn't try anything so far because I don't know where to start, and I can't search because I don't know what to search for, is there a better way to do it ? thanks
If you're really looking for something like network traffic sniffer written in Java you'll need to start with researching Jpcap.
You could try their samples, they seem to have a code for Java Tcpdump implementation ready to use.
But listening to traffic is a hack and not a solution, thus should be used episodically and not in production. And if it's not in production why bother with Java and not use command line tools like tcpdump or ethereal?