Counting www server hits

[Chuck Bearden]

Thanks to Albert, Thomas, and Andrew for their replies on HEAD 
requests and the odd server log entries.  

Albert's reply confirmed me in my intention not to count HEAD 
requests.  

As for the log entries with the "-" instead of the normal "<method>
<URI> <version>" syntax, I'm still puzzled.  It is referred to in
rfc 2068 under section 3.2.1 General syntax as a possible value for
the elements "scheme" and "safe", as well as in a few other places,
but none of them seem relevent, at least insofar as I understand the
rfc. I probably need to do some more homework here.  

Thomas suggests that they are the result of a timeout.  Yet all of
the status codes are 200 (OK), apparently indicating the successful
response to a query, while his demo of a timeout returned the status
code 408 (Request timeout).  Andrew suggests that these might be
requests from behind a firewall, yet I see such entries for machines
on our LAN, which certainly aren't going through a firewall to get
documents from our web server.   I'm baffled.   

Chuck
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Chuck Bearden			
                                email: cbearden at hpl.lib.tx.us
Network Services Librarian
Automation Department		voice: 713/247-2264
Houston Public Library		fax:   713/247-1182
500 McKinney Ave.
Houston, TX  77002		
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