When you order a Internetter Virtual Server, you get access logs for your account. If the Statistics program was installed with your account, the following information is generally unnecessary, since the Statistics program handles the access log graphically.
These logfiles are not part of your 30 megabytes of web and FTP space.
When visitors "access" your web pages via their web browser certain information is automatically logged to your "access.log" file. Below we'll tell you how to retrieve the files and how to read the information placed in these files.
Your access logs are located in
/var/log/httpd
There are two files:
USERID.access.log USERID.error.log
where USERID is your UserID of the form webxxxxx.
You can retrieve them through FTP. Connect to your site, and then change the directory to /var/log/httpd. Highlight your logfiles and transfer them to your computer.
The access logs are purged weekly, because they can get very large. If you need them, you should download them once a week. Access logs are refreshed every Monday (such as 12:30am Monday or so). You can find your previous week's log in the /var/log/previousLogs (note capital "L") directory. These files are overwritten with every week's update. If your access log data is important to you, we strongly suggest that you download your access logs often.
Although Internetter backs up the entire system regularly, the company is not responsible for retaining your access logs.
Here is an example of one hit from a log file generated by our server:
134.82.72.15 - - [01/Apr/1997:00:22:51 -0800] "GET /subdir/file.html HTTP/1.0" 200 1559
Let's look at the logs line by line:
When you log on to your ISP, your computer is given an IP address, and also a name. Doing a reverse lookup on the IP address gives the name, which in this case comes from a New York dialup ISP.
Sometimes a reverse lookup fails, because the ISP that assigns the IP address is inferior. Due to inferior ISPs that cannot handle a reverse name lookup, the logfiles no longer generate it automatically.