Flex / AIR - Can it receive SYSLOG notices?

Question

Is there a way for Flex / AIR to receive syslog notices from devices such as cisco switches etc? Does anyone know of any information I can read or sites to look at?

Answer 1

If you are talking about calling native methods, flex/air cannot do that. But there is an opensource AIR-Java bridge namely merapi that lets you connect your AIR app with java code. I guess java should be able to do what you are looking for.

Answer 2

AIR apps can read local files. In the case of receiving syslog notices from cisco switches or other devices, I used to set them up on the receiving machine to be added to the local syslog there to have everything in one place (we're not talking windows here :-)). Using mtail and grep I had a few consoles open that showed me what was coming in.

If you write an Actionscript parser to read your local syslog - using bytearray like described here - then it should be possible to read through the whole file and note the interesting bits (I haven't done this myself, so no guarantees!)

If it more a question of getting real time data from devices, I would look into snmp (but you will probably need to write additional stuff in php or python to query the devices for you).