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:: Frequently Asked Questions ::
Can the messages be sent to a file,
or a database?
Messages can be exported to text file from the viewer in
v2.1 or higher. Open the viewer, select the appropriate
messages you want to export by using a filter and then select
File | Export. The text file can then be imported into Excel
or a database for further manipulation.
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Can the messages be sent automatically
to a database?
By using Ox along with Paul Bunyan you can accomplish this.
You can configure Ox to act upon any type of message or
all messages and then execute an SQL command to any ODBC
target. For example, if you wanted to only log out error
messages to a separate database, this could be automatically
done.Back to top
What's the maximum number
of Message Viewers can be connected to a single Message
Server?
Unlimited by PB - limited only by operating system constraints
on things like number of concurrent socket connections and
general OS resources.Back to top
What's the maximum number
of Message Servers can a Message Viewer be connected to?
Unlimited by PB - limited only by operating system constraints
on things like number of concurrent socket connections and
general OS resources.Back to top
Is there anything special
needed to run Paul Bunyan on Terminal Edition Servers?
Paul Bunyan 2.2 or higher will work with Terminal Services.
The only caveat is that Paul Bunyan MUST be installed using
control panel | add/remove programs from the server.
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Does the Message Viewer
supports multi-line viewing of messages?
The viewer won't display messages multiline in the query
displays (just one LM per line) but if you use tabs, newlines,
carriage returns and similar in the message text they will
affect the formatting when you pull the message up in the
Details dialog and/or subsequently hit View to export the
message out to Notepad.Back to top
Can the Message Server be
configured dynamically ? Can the configuration be done remotely?
Yes and yes. File | Configurations menu pick in the viewer.
Discussed in detail in online help.Back to top
Does the Message Logger
APIs return immediately or does it wait for a response?
Returns immediately in all cases. Whether there are errors,
out of memory, whether the message server is running, backlogged,
or even not-installed. Logging rates are ~50K/sec and absolutely
NOTHING will affect that (i.e. nothing makes the PBLog()
block/hang).Back to top
The size of the message
storage is configurable. When the message storage is full,
what will happen? Will it overwrite it?
Message Server just manages a big FIFO queue of configurable
size - First In First Out, period. Messages are deleted
by chronological order only as needed to achieve desired
(configured) memory usage settings.Back to top
If the Message Server failed,
does it inform the admin? What will happen to the messages?
Will the messages be queued?
Admin/user is informed in the case of ANY errors/failures
via PB itself or the NT Event Log. There is no queuing mechanism
in the case of failures. The Message Server itself IS the
queue. Failures historically never happen except for out
of memory conditions (i.e. IPC buffer too small) and all
of these are entirely configurable.Back to top
Does the license agreement
include source code?
License agreement does not include source code but we do
have it under source code escrow and can add your company
as a registered recipient for a nominal charge. If interested
in source beyond escrowed protection then please contact
the sales department at Sales@DiamondSierra.com.
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What type of support for
Java applications is supplied?
If you are using Java on a Win32 platform, then you can
use the COM interface. Because Paul Bunyan, Ox and Falcon
are Pure Win32 applications, we do not have support for
other options as this time.Back to top
Does Paul Bunyan support
Linux or Solaris or other Unix platforms?
At this time, we only support Win32 platforms. We do have
a few customers who are logging messages from Unix to a
Win32 platform via the socket interceptor. Please contact
our sales department at sales@diamondsierra.com
for a discussion on what is possible here.Back to top
Is there a way to display
the time of the source message in milliseconds granularity,
or even less? This will help to find out what is the time
difference between rapidly occurring events.
We have 2 additional options in displaying time. In the
Paul Bunyan Viewer, select Query | display settings | Time
Display. Pick the custom format you wish to use and add
either xx or xxx after it. An example is: %H:%M:%Sxx or
%H:%M:%Sxxx. The xx will display 4 decimal places and the
xxx will display 9. Technically, Paul Bunyan tracks the
message time to 7 decimal places and then adds 2 more places
for tiebreakers.Back to top
Can I use Paul Bunyan with
Delphi?
Paul Bunyan does not have a Delphi-specific interface but
it does support a COM object interface as well as a standard
format Win32 interface (freeware DLL available off web site).
In short, you can use Paul Bunyan with any environment/language
that runs under Windows 9x/NT/2000.Back to top
Is there a way to prevent
the Viewer from deleting log messages?
There is no way to disable deletion or flag things so a
confirmation dialog comes up. You can however do two things:
First, you can create a second query that has its auto-delete
setting disabled. This will effectively act as a recycle
bin as any messages deleted in other queries will simply
get flagged with a red X in the 'recycle bin query' rather
than automatically discarded. This will also cause the viewer
to ask you if you want to restore deleted messages when
you shut it down or close the workspace.
The second
thing to keep in mind is that deleting a log message in
the viewer has no effect on the server's log message cache.
As such, you can at any time go to the viewer's connection
configuration dialog and 1) close the connection, 2) reset
the connection's 'cookie' , and 3) reconnect and (because
of the now NULL cookie) redownload every message the server
still has in its cache.
Back to top
Our software is a set of
NT services that run and talk to one another – I had them
all running as account TEST\TEST1. If I set TEST\TEST1 to
be a local administrator, everything is fine. If administrator
privileges are removed, all logging to Paul Bunyan stopped.
As soon as I made it a local administrator again, logging
started up.
The logging applications do not have write access to the
IPC buffer - a memory mapped file which is used to communicate
log messages between the logging applications and the PB
message server. Easiest way to verify/fix this is to use
the PB setup app (accessible from the Start menu off the
Task bar) to reconfigure the location of the IPC buffer
to some place that all non-admin user accounts have write
access to - e.g. C:\Temp. The default is C:\Program Files\Paul
Bunyan (or similar). The location chosen for the file must
be a local, non-network, drive that all processes have write
access to (regardless of what user account they are running
under via the desktop or via NT service configuration).
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How come PB doesn't allow
you to install it unless you have the INSTALL EXE in the
exact same path from which it was originally installed?
Do you have any recommendation as to the best step to clean
up a corrupted installation?
The installer application we used in Paul Bunyan requires
the an install be in the same location – such as a CD drive.
Where, in the case of PB, the 'installation media' per se
is simply the self-extracting installation PBnn-nn-nn.exe
file as opposed to a CD. At this time we are not sure exactly
when the installer needs to go back to the 'installation
media' and when it doesn't but the lack of that expected
file seems to be the root of the problems. On the plus side,
we've never seen a corrupted installation or any other problems
associated with the install beyond the one you describe
- sometimes not being able to run the install program to
modify/uninstall PB if the PB-nn-nn-nn.exe file is deleted
or moved. Bad news is that we have no solution except to
delete the reginfo & PB directory and re-install from scratch.
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