Meta Redirects and CGI

tradez has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Meta Redirects and CGI by screamingeagle (Curate) on Jan 27, 2002 at 14:36 UTC
Another alternative would be to refer to the Environment variable hash %ENV which contains information such as the referring page, the ip address of the referrer,etc for example, the remote host can be obtained by : `$remote_host = $ENV{'REMOTE_HOST'};` [download] or the referring url by : `$referrer = $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'};` [download] hope this helps... :)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Meta Redirects and CGI by LukeyBoy (Friar) on Jan 27, 2002 at 13:37 UTC
Probably the easiest way to grab the IP address is: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use CGI; my $cgi = new CGI; my $ip = $cgi->remote_host(); print "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n"; print "<html><body>Your IP address is $ip.</body></html>";	[reply]
Re: Meta Redirects and CGI by gt8073a (Hermit) on Jan 27, 2002 at 20:33 UTC
We want the ability to log to an Oracle DB as much information as we can on who, and the number of who, downloaded our product and when This is not a pure perl suggestion, but I prefer letting web servers handle their own logging. If you are tracking downloads for marketing reasons ( build those who and when relationships! ), you may also want to watch how users navigate through your site to get to the actual download. Or, you may be interested in where visitors come from before they download. All of this is probably already logged in a file somewhere, but DBAs have to earn their keep like everyone else. Right? If you have an Apache server with mod_perl, you can use Apache::DBILogConfig. If you do not have Apache and mod_perl, I apologize because I can not help you. I am not saying using a script for this is neccessarily a bad thing, it might be all you need. And, mod_perl might be extreme overkill. Will perl for money JJ Knitis (901) 756-7693 gt8073a@industrialmusic.com	[reply]
Re: Re: Meta Redirects and CGI by tradez (Pilgrim) on Jan 27, 2002 at 22:45 UTC
I do have mod_perl and am looking into your suggestion right now, thank you for your thought. Tradez "Never underestimate the predicability of stupidity" - Bullet Tooth Tony, Snatch (2001)	[reply]
Re: Meta Redirects and CGI by Parham (Friar) on Jan 27, 2002 at 19:35 UTC
to answer your question, if you want to grab the ip of a user, look at $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'}. I'll take it a step further, if you want to change that IP into an address (or if $ENV{'REMOTE_HOST'} doesn't exist), try this: `$ip = $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'}; @digits = split (/\./, $ip); $address = pack ("C4", @digits); $host = gethostbyaddr ($address, 2);` [download] other environmental variables you might find useful: $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} will contain where the user came from (a url) $ENV{'HTTP_USER_AGENT'} contains browser information of the user $ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} contains the request method (post, get) $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} is what the query string was, everything after the '?' in the url	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Meta Redirects and CGI by atcroft (Abbot) on Jan 27, 2002 at 23:02 UTC
This is just an observation, but once they know the redirected target, they might be able to obtain other software if they have a reasonable guess as to the filename. You might consider having the CGI script pipe out the headers and content to initiate the download. You could call it something similar to /cgi-bin/logger.cgi/product.filename , so the browser would try to save it with the proper name. You would also have to be aware of the Content-Type and Content-length headers for product.filename. A little more work, perhaps, and off of your original question, but perhaps a little more likely not to be bypassed.	[reply]