This is two questions in one, I'll start with the shorter one: "how do you monitor your servers' activity?" (apache access, ssh, ftp, etc) in realtime? I mean, I'm surely not the only one wishing to be able to do so from my desktop.

Now, the long part: my best guess is on doing "tail -f" on the appropriate log file, and it can be done via ssh. However, I want it to be "embedded" into my desktop. So there are a few ways I tried to find information on, to no avail.
* embedding terminals into a gnome desktop (as objects, not windows)
In the terminals, there would be some way to automatically login through ssh and do the tailing?

* using multitail for gdesklets
I got this one to work, but it only tails local files (duh..)
Note: I don't want to use NFS/Samba

I've been searching for days and I still can't find anyone that knew of a way to do this. Any thoughts?

I would setup a php web page that displayed the tail of all the logs you want to monitor and set the page to refresh every minute.

I use KBear (kde sftp/ftp client) and just inspect the relevant log files a couple of times a day.

You can run GKrellM remotely - it can report activity on individual ports as well as CPU & eth0 in general...

Setup Nagios..

www.nagios.org

Thanks for the replies someone else also pointed me to www.zabbix.com which I think would suit me better, because I have a very small server (I'm no production hosting company, I'm just a kid in the basement experimenting )

Maybe this could also help: http://fedoranews.org/krishnan/tips/tip006.shtml.

http://fedoranews.org/krishnan/tips/tip006.shtml

I fixed it

Another good monitoring/graphing tool is www.cacti.net

Another not too shabby product (has gone commercial since,
but 2.05 I think is still available) is eEMU ...

Got the version wrong :)


http://www.google.co.nz/linux?hl=en&...G=Search&meta=

Cheers,
Tink