If you look what sysadm's do with the Unix logs, you'll see that they
use either one of the following approaches:
1) have something looking at syslog (and/or serial console logs), and
storing them for their analisys, in text format;
2) convert syslog errors into a SNMP object UID's, on a machine-readable code,
in order to manage them via some SNMP management system.
On both cases, the approach is there for a long time.
If an error "magic" code is added, both ways will break, as sysadm's won't be
able to understand the meaning of the magic number, and the SNMP conversion
tools won't be ready to convert that magic code into something else.
Of course, with time, the SNMP parsers will eventually add the needed decoders
for the magic numbers, in order to convert them into a MIB representation.
So, even being a number, such code is not machine readable (at least not for the
right tools), as it is not an SNMP object, so, the management systems won't catch
it without a parser.
So, IMO, the better is to keep providing a text message.
We might think on adding a way to directly output a SNMP UID from kernel,
but this seems overkill to me, and anything else would just be meaningless
for most sysadmins.
Thanks,
Mauro.
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