Counting www server hits

[Thomas Dowling]

 >First, how do you all out there treat successful HEAD requests for
>the purpose of reporting numbers of hits?  From the rfcs it looks to
>me as if they probably aren't reqests for documents, as it seems to
>me that GET's returning a 304 (not modified) are.
>
>Second, I have a few lines in last month's access_log like this:
>
>198.65.99.64 - - [25/Aug/1997:20:37:50 -0500] "-" 200 -
>
>where the part that normally specifies the URL and the method is
>just a "-".  I find reference to this notation in the rfc for HTTP
>1.1, but I don't yet know enough about the protocol to really fit
>this in to understand what was requested (and, apparently,
>successfully provided).
>

The hyphen indicates the connection timed out before the browser issued an
HTTP request:

    olc2.ohiolink.edu> telnet olc2.ohiolink.edu 80
    Trying 198.30.120.22...
    Connected to olc2.ohiolink.edu.
    Escape character is '^]'.

    <Five minutes go by...>

    Connection closed by foreign host.
    olc2.ohiolink.edu> tail -5000 access_log | grep olc2
    olc2.ohiolink.edu - - [03/Sep/1997:07:53:08 -0400] "-" 408 -



Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu