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. :)
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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.
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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.
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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).
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