RE: RE: Poor Man's Web Logger

[comatose]

Thanks for the good feedback. I took some of your comments and incorporated them into a new version and expanded on some ideas as well.

For example, the reason I constructed the $date and $hostname into a single variable was so that I could put a different label on each entry. With the %entries hash, you can now setup different pattern matches and the corresponding log entry.

I left it doing the hostname lookup everytime simply because every sane web server administrator has hostname lookups for access turned off, leaving that variable empty.

If I were cruel, I'd have it send SERVER_ADMIN an email everytime it got a REMOTE_HOST variable. :)

[btrott]

A question about this REMOTE_HOST stuff--generally, server admins disable the hostname translation because it slows down the server, correct? I agree that it's the "sane" thing to do--but in this case, aren't you sort of defeating the purpose by doing the hostname translation yourself?

The whole point, I thought, was to disable runtime hostname translation, because it slows things down; you seem to agree, so why re-introduce this step? Why not just log IP addresses, then run a cron job later as part of your stat analysis to do the hostname translation?

Just something to think about. If I'm missing the main issues, let me know.

[turnstep]

I think in this case, the server parses more than just his page, and more than just his domain, perhaps. This is just his way of "turning it back on" even though the sysadmin for the server that hosts his site has it turned off. Just a guess.

I have sites that have it both ways. btrott has a good point, however: doing it later would also allow you to cache the answers, freeing some (perhaps a lot) of calls to gethostbyaddr. Unless it is a really, really busy page, however, it probably does not hurt too much to look it up each time.

[comatose]

What you say is true to a certain extent. However, this logger is for when you don't have access to regular log files. My dialup ISP actually lets me do CGI in my home directory but doesn't let me have access to log files.

And since my site gets about 4 or 5 visitors a day, the system hit is almost nil. If I were getting a visitor a minute, I might change it. Also as it is, it's only doing one lookup per page. That's a lot less than the standard number of lookups for a full page (html plus images).

[turnstep]

>I left it doing the hostname lookup everytime
>simply because every sane web server administrator
>has hostname lookups for access turned off,
>leaving that variable empty.

Well, I guess sanity is in the eye of the beholder! :)