Re: Common Log format

On Wed, 12 Apr 1995, Brian Behlendorf wrote:

> I was going to say this is something you could do with a Perl script, one 
> that parsed your config files so it knew accesses to /dirname/ = 
> /dirname/index.html, but that information isn't necessarily available at 
> log-analysis time if your site changes frequently.  

Right.

> The real question is - what do you do when the requested object and the
> object actually delivered differ?  This can be because of short cuts
> (DirectoryIndex in httpd, soft links in the file system, etc) or now content
> negotiation, where a request for /dirname/ could return /dirname/index,
> /dirname/index.html, /dirname/index.html3, or /dirname/index.cgi. 
> However, there are good debugging-related reasons for knowing the actual 
> request was.

I'm prepared to log both.  My server will provide multiple logging 
levels, and I will include perl scripts to turn any format into the 
common log format for statistics packages.  If it were one or the other, I 
think most people would prefer knowing what data was sent to what was 
requested.

> $HOST $IDENTD $AUTHUSER [$MDAY/$MN/$YR:$HR:$MN:$SC $GMT] "$REQUEST" $ERRCODE $LENGTH

This is a nice idea.  The trick is getting support from the statistics 
package writers and the server writers, because each would wait on the 
other, I'd imagine.

 -PSP

Received on Thursday, 13 April 1995 01:19:15 UTC