Rich Bowen

/usr/local/apache/bin/apache -f /usr/local/apache/conf/name2_httpd.conf This lets you start as many server daemons as your machine can stand, each one running a different server configuration. Make sure, of course, that each configuration file has a Port directive pointing at a different port, or every one after the first one will fail to start, giving you an error […]

The seventh and final piece of information is the total number of bytes that were transferred to the client. This can tell you if a transfer was interrupted (if the number is different from the size of the file). Adding them up will tell you how much data your server transferred in a day, or […]

Of course, sometimes, you don’t have the luxury of giving your machine multiple IP addresses. IP addresses are in shorter and shorter supply, and frequently, such as if you have an DSL connection as I do, you only have one. In this case, name-based virtual hosting is for you. You don’t have to give your […]

Trolling through the source code for WWWStat is another good way to learn about Perl log file parsing. And that’s about it Not much more to say here. I’m sure that I’ve missed out someone’s favorite log parsing tool, and that’s to be expected. There are hundreds of them on the market. It’s really a […]

The Analog web site (http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/) claims that about 29 percent of all web sites that use any log analysis tool at all use Analog. They claim that this makes it the most popular log analysis tool in the world. This fascinated me in particular, because until last week, I had never heard of it. I […]

First, we have the date/time stamp. And the first thing that you might notice is that the format is not the same as the format in the access_log. The format that we called the “standard english format.” I suspect that this is an accident of history, and that it’s probably too late to change it […]

Without logs, it would be very difficult to troubleshoot most CGI programs, because running the program from the command line is a rather different environment than running it from a web server. Nine times out of eight, when someone complains on a mailing list, or on a newsgroup, that they are having CGI problems, and […]

The directives above only let one person (specifically someone with a username of rbowen) into the directory. In most cases, you’ll want to let more than one person in. This is where the AuthGroupFile comes in. In the example above, we’ve pointed AuthGroupFile to /dev/null, which is Unix-speak for “nowhere” or “off into space.” (The […]

So, the LogFormat line above, from the default httpd.conf file, creates a log format called common, which contains the remote host, remote logname, remote user, the time of the transaction, the first line of the request, the status of the request, and the number of bytes sent. Which is pretty much what I went through […]

When a program runs through the web server as a CGI program, it does not have that path. Any programs that you invoke in your CGI program (like sendmail, for example) will need to be specified by a full path, so that the shell can find them when it attempts to execute your CGI program. […]

You could explicitly use the Options directive, inside your main server configuration file, to specify that CGI execution was permitted in a particular directory: Options +ExecCGI You might do this if, for some reason, you really wanted to serve CGI out of a document directory. The ScriptAlias directive is a combination of an Alias directive […]

If you are going to be doing more with these files, you will probably want something a little easier to automate. Perhaps the best tool for this will be Perl, using the DB_File module. The technique that is used with this module is a tied hash, which, simplified, means that the module causes the file […]