Well - if these machines are unixes, you could use cron and the crontab-files, to push the logfiles hourly. This could be done with ftp/ tftp.
Using xmail to push the files would be a typical unix-solution too.
If you want to implement a scheduler in java have a look at jquar(t)z - not sure about the 't'.
If you insist in pulling, again I would think of using ftp to get the files - ftp was build for that

.