Integrated Online Solutions

2005.12.06 Web log file path munging

Using various subdomains other than "www" has become increasingly used by virtual hosting accounts, in order to separate content, and utilise different servers for different purposes (Zope vs. Apache, for example). A problem with this is that when a person views their web logs all of the root directory hits on all subdomains appear to be the same path: there is no way to tell which subdomain is being hit. The log file parser has now been modified to insert the full domain name that generated the hit at the beginning of request path. So a hit to http://www.domain.x/index.html will appear in the logs as /www.domain.x/index.html, while a hit to http://zope.domain.x/index.html will appear as /zope.domain.x/index.html. Previously both hits would appear as just /index.html in the logs. If this change is a problem for anyone, let us know and we'll work out a way to filter the domains out of the path of your logs. Since logs are used mostly for statistics purposes, we hope that in most cases the change we have made will make your statistics more precise. This does not affect non-virtual hosting clients.