[Flora-help] Apache logs.
Russell McOrmond
I got a question in email about Apache logs and if they are accessible
to FLORA.org groups. The short answer is no.
The longer answer is that this is a resource issue. The logs are
collected into a single group of files that are quite large (when all
groups are added together, this is a large site). Logfiles for each
individual group would need to be generated from those files, and then
automatically expired in some way as to not take up too much disk space.
All of this requires tools to automate the process, or a person able to
do it by hand. I don't have the time-resources to do either, so it is
just not getting done.
If someone authors/tests/etc some scripts to do this (sorting, expiry,
etc) then this becomes quite possible. There have been a number of scripts
over the years that would help FLORA.org people, but unfortunately not the
technical volunteers to get these projects done.
Other example: I am wanting to close weblog.flora.* and archive those
messages. What is needed is a simple script that will walk through the
existing articles and generate static .shtml files (proper template and
all that) and set up smart redirecting such that links to the old messages
would go to the right static file.
To replace that weblog I want to resurrect the FLORA.org announcement
mailing list, with most of the articles being more related to what is now
on my BLOG on digital-copyright.ca than anything that was remotely
connected to FLORA.org. Hopefully the various groups on FLORA.org will
start to send in announcements to be distributed by that list.
http://www.flora.org/flora.announce/129
--
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
Have you, your family, your friends (, your enemies) signed the
Petition to the Canadian Parliament for Users' Rights in Copyright?
http://digital-copyright.ca/petition/
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Bill Royds
one for each group and send them to appropriate users, then delete them (perhaps
after 3 or 4 days to avoid loss).
I have already done this for the government department where I am a web manager
(which has about 500 MB/day of log files to process). It would need a table of
web directory <-> email account|sftp location.
Russell McOrmond
On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Bill Royds wrote:
> I am quite willing to write scripts (most likely Perl) to break out logs
> into one for each group and send them to appropriate users, then delete
> them (perhaps after 3 or 4 days to avoid loss).
If the files are daily, then for most groups keeping the per-day logs
available for 30 days would be fine as well. I am more thinking of the
huge amount of logs that having a few months would cause.
> I have already done this for the government department where I am a web
> manager (which has about 500 MB/day of log files to process). It would
> need a table of web directory <-> email account|sftp location.
We could discuss this offline, but suspect that discussing it here may
help others. Not sure what you are thinking as far as the email account,
unless you are thinking of attaching the logs in an email message rather
than storing them on disk.
FLORA.org also only uses FTP -- one of these days someone will set up an
sftp server that does chroot() like the regular FTP server does, in which
case we could adopt it. At the moment that is simply not feasible.
The table could be automatically extracted from the Apache config file.
Plan A:
Each group has an entry like:
Alias /greenspace/ /home/greenspace/greenspace/
Which shows a first-level alias.
Some groups also have
Alias /re-cycles/forum/ /home/re-cycles/re-cycles/forum.phtml/
Which could be ignored.
The above would be:
group: greenspace
logs to be put in: /home/greenspace/logs/
Plan B:
I use 'special comments' for entries for various things such as:
#X-flora2 Nov 25, 2004
This is the flag I was using to easily mark which sites were ready for
FLORA.org 2.0. I have a similar comment with contact email addresses.
We could do:
#X-Archive /greenspace/ /home/greenspace/logs/
This would be far more explicit, and would allow me to turn it on only
for the groups that want it.
Bill Royds
be a URL so one could have
#X-Archive /greenspace/ file://home/greenspace/logs/
Or
#X-Archive /greenspace/ ftp:bro...@ftp.royds.net/home/greenspace/logs/
Or
#X-Archive /greenspace/
mailto:lo...@greenspace-alliance.ca&Subject="Logs_weblog%d"
Perl can easily parse those and call the correct Net:: module according to the
scheme, although the ftp has password problems
The entry could also have a third field with an expiry time in days, with a
default if missing.
-----Original Message-----
From: flora-hel...@list.flora.org
[mailto:flora-hel...@list.flora.org] On Behalf Of Russell McOrmond
Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 11:36 AM
To: FLORA.org helpdesk