We do all our log processing as a user called "stats" on one of our machines. The root accounts on all our web servers have their ssh public keys in the stats user's authorized_keys file, and they run a nifty log rotation program that uploads the log data to the box we do all our log analysis/etc on. It also inserts some metadata about the logfile into an sql database. All that happens as user root.
Then, everything else happens as user stats on the one machine. It uses webalizer to process the files (we may change to something else when we have spare time, webalizer is not great but the customers like the graphs/etc) and then extracts summary data from each site's webalizer.hist file and populates yet another sql table. We have other log-related tools which do things like gzip the log files after a configurable number of hours, delete them from the web servers themselves (they have to remain there for a little while so they're available to customers), etc. We also use the summary data collected from webalizer.hist to bill our customers for their traffic. It's an incredible pain in the ass to go through all your customer sites and figure out how much traffic they did in a month, then do your own calculations to determine how much $$$ they owe you based on "included traffic" plans, cost per mega/gigabyte, etc. After a few months of doing that, it got automated. :-) Does anyone else on the list have similar billing / log processing systems for their web hosting companies? One of our vendors (!) asked us if we would license our software to them, but we don't really have a refined user-interface yet. And as with any patchy, home-grown billing system it often requires the care of a programmer to add features, etc. We've thought about a small monthly fee that would include any requested features/etc. What do other folks do? - jsw -----Original Message----- From: Jeremy Lunn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 4:26 AM To: James Cc: Jason Lim; debian-isp@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Strange apache behaviour? On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 09:41:00AM +0100, James wrote: > It is usual to run webalizer as a user? I have never even thought of > doing that. Is there any particular reason? (security?) Generally it is a good idea to run everything you can as non-root. Come to think of it, I probably have webalizer running as root on a few machines (whoops!). -- Jeremy Lunn Melbourne, Australia Find me on Jabber today! Try my email address as my JID. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
