Rich Bowen wrote:
These are optional fields which *may* be passed by a user agent. When they
are passed, they are not reliable - that is, they may be spoofed, trivially.
Understood. I'm not depending on them for any decision-making.
The issue is that Analog discards those lines, so (for example) requests
logged for a particular file (which are missing those two fields) are dis-
carded and not counted for purpose of things like top 25 requested files.
Also, they're completely absent, despite the escaped s in the LogFormat
directive which should generate either or - - when the fields are
missing.
It would be interesting to see what version of what browser released in the
last 30 days.
Most of the clients accessing the site in question are using ancient
browsers - in one case where I investigated fully, the client PC is running
Windows 2000 and IE 6. Some of its accesses had the Referer and User-Agent
logged, while others had them missing.
One system where I have logs going back 2+ years shows a number of entries
with missing fields at a reasonably constant rate (200 to 5000 per month),
with no big jump. Oddly, that's the system where I'd expect new client ver-
sions (like Firefox 5) to show up, yet the number of logged lines where the
fields are missing remains relatively constant.
It seems that either both fields are properly present, or both are missing.
I was unable to locate any log lines which had either a Referer or - but
which were missing the User-Agent field.
Oh. Hmm. That's interesting. What I would look for, in that case, is more
than one LogFormat directive logging to the same location.
I thought of that and checked it previously. However, I just checked it
again (Apache 2.0.63 system):
(0:12) www:/usr/local/etc/apache2# grep CustomLog *
httpd.conf:# a CustomLog directive (see below).
httpd.conf:#CustomLog /var/log/httpd-access.log common
httpd.conf:#CustomLog /var/log/httpd-referer.log referer
httpd.conf:#CustomLog /var/log/httpd-agent.log agent
httpd.conf:CustomLog /var/log/httpd-access.log combined
httpd.conf:#CustomLog /var/log/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common
httpd.conf:CustomLog /var/log/httpd-deflate.log deflate
ssl.conf:CustomLog /var/log/httpd-ssl_request.log \
ssl.conf_orig:CustomLog /var/log/httpd-ssl_request.log \
I only see 3 uncommented CustomLog directives, one for a combined log,
a separate one that logs deflate info, and a third one for SSL requests.
There also isn't any discernable pattern to the entries with the missing
fields - some CGI requests are logged with them, some without. Same for PHP.
Some are for 404's, some are for successful file access.
I'm baffled. I wonder if anyone else is having the same issue, but didn't
notice it. For example, Analog will only complain about Large number of
corrupt lines in logfile if they exceed a certain percentage threshold of
the total number of lines in the log file.
The following (disgusting, I really should use awk) command string should
report the total number of lines missing the Referer and User-Agent fields
in a combined-format logfile, at least if the default timestamp format is
used:
cut -d \] -f 2-99 /var/log/httpd-access.log | cut -d \ -f 3-99 | cut -d -f
4-99 | grep ^$ | wc -l
Anybody want to try it? (Of course, satisfy yourself that it can't do
anything evil first).
On two of my production systems running 2.0.63:
(0:23) www:/tmp# cut -d \] -f 2-99 /var/log/httpd-access.log | cut -d \ -f
3-99 | cut -d -f 4-99 | grep ^$ | wc -l
743308
(0:24) www:/tmp# wc -l /var/log/httpd-access.log
4802394 /var/log/httpd-access.log
(0:175) gate:/tmp# cut -d \] -f 2-99 /var/log/httpd-access.log | cut -d \ -f
3-99 | cut -d -f 4-99 | grep ^$ | wc -l
99583
(0:176) gate:/tmp# wc -l /var/log/httpd-access.log
3658733 /var/log/httpd-access.log
On a 2.2.19 test system I just brought up:
(0:36) test:/tmp# cut -d \] -f 2-99 /var/log/httpd-access.log | cut -d \ -f
3-99 | cut -d -f 4-99 | grep ^$ | wc -l
433
(0:37) test:/tmp# wc -l /var/log/httpd-access.log
1321 /var/log/httpd-access.log
The test system is particularly interesting as I did NOT copy the Apache
configuration files from a production system - I configured it by editing
the default config files. So this shouldn't be a cut-and-paste error.
Terry Kennedy http://www.tmk.com
te...@tmk.com New York, NY USA
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