Martin Brown

Using HTTP logs to track the users who visit your site isn’t always as useful as you think it’s going to be. While metrics, like the total number of page hits and, within that, page hits over time or from a specific IP address, easily identify, they don’t always tell how people are viewing your […]

Adding mod_usertrack to Your Apache Installation The mod_usertrack module is not part of the standard Apache installation, so to use it you must first add the module to your installation. If you are using a dynamic version of Apache, reconfigure your Apache installation (using configure) and add the –enable-usertrack=shared to the configuration command line. Then, […]

Choosing an Expiry Time The final directive you may want to configure is the expiry time for the cookie. The expiry time helps determine the difference between “sessions” of the same user. As long as the user keeps using the Web site, the session will be updated, but when he leaves the site, the cookie […]

Dynamic Solutions If you are developing a dynamic site (i.e., using PHP, Perl, or Java), then the mod_usertrack module will not be very useful. This is because much of the site’s functionality may be embedded into the dynamic components. This can make the limited output mod_usertrack provides useless because the form elements and components are […]

There’s a finite amount of bandwidth on most Internet connections, and anything administrators can do to speed up the process is worthwhile. One way to do this is via HTTP compression, a capability built into both browsers and servers that can dramatically improve site performance by reducing the amount of time required to transfer data […]

m0n0wall The m0n0wall project is designed to provide a complete firewall solution, ideally aimed at the embedded PC market, although the operating system can be used on any PC with suitable networking hardware. The operating system is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD and is combined with a Web server and PHP (for management […]

Cookie Lifetimes Each cookie is given a lifetime; when the period expires, the browser deletes the cookie. Time periods can be set literally (i.e., a specific date/time), duration (number of seconds from the time the cookie is set), or simply to exist only during the current browser session (the cookie is deleted once the browser […]

Creating a Unique ID A critical step in making use of sessions is to create a session ID unique enough to singularly identify the session. There are many ways of doing this, the most obvious is in a dynamic environment using the unique sequence ID generated by a database (which is particularly useful if you […]

Using Apache::Session Although cookies can be used to store all sorts of information, it is generally not a good idea to use them to store all the data. In particular, shopping basket information, user identification data (e.g., address, e-mail, and especially password and credit card information) should never be stored within a cookie. This is […]

For some time, Apache and Microsoft have commanded the lion’s share of the Web server market. While Apache is the clear-cut winner in the Netcraft and Security Space monthly surveys, Internet Information Server dominates among Fortune 1000 enterprises. SWatch Reader Favorite! IIS and Apache are the two most widely deployed Web servers. Not surprisingly, each […]

You’d be amazed at how much information your machine, operating systems, and applications generate during their normal course of operation. One of my relatively quiet Unix servers, for example, generates about 2 MB of syslog information every week. But that information is completely useless unless it is converted into meaningful data about what is going […]

Organizations that want to use a public Unix variant have two solutions from which to chose: Linux and BSD. The much talked about Linux camp contains a variety of distributions that include different utilities and tool sets. The same is true of the less frequently covered BSD camp. This article compares and contrasts the four […]