Linux System Administration

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Chapter 6: Administering Apache

If you have DNS records that point www1.centralsoft.org and www2.centralsoft.org

to your server, you can aim your browser at http://www1.centralsoft.org/index.html

and http://www2.centralsoft.org/index.html and see the contents of the test index.html

files that you just made.

Logfiles

Apache writes ASCII logfiles of two types: access (requests that come to the server)

and error (errors that occur during requests). You control how much is written to

these files, depending on what you want to know about visitors to your site, how

much disk space you have (logs get big), and what log analysis tools you want to

apply.

A typical access message (broken onto several lines to fit the page) is:

192.168.0.1 - - [22/Sep/2006:15:04:05 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1"

200 580 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US;

rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7"

A typical error message is:

[Fri Sep 29 10:13:11 2006] [error]

[client www.centralsoft.org]

File does not exist: /var/www/index.html

The default logs are /var/log/apache2/access.log and /var/log/apache2/error.log.

Log Splitting and Rotation

The default Apache setup includes a daily cron job that rotates the access and error

logs. It does the rotation as follows:

1. Renames access.log to access.log.1 and error.log to error.log.1

2. Increments the number suffixes of the older rotated logs (e.g., access.log.1 is

incremented ...