[WEB4LIB] Re: Sniffers?

[Stephen Treger]

Noone really is answering the real question, which is how to grab the 
traffic. Your best bet would be to install and configure your users to go 
through a proxy. Something free like Squid has great performance, caching, 
and generates log files. You can compile it for any UNIX system. Or deploy 
a NetWare BorderManager - which has earned top picks. Obviously it is more 
expensive.

Using a sniffer is okay, though if you are in a switched environment you 
would  need to 'sniff' at the router. There are free sniffers out there for 
various platforms - though getting them to work passively with the various 
network cards can be difficult.

Deploying a proxy (such as Squid) will increase retrieval for your clients 
for static pages, I definately recommend looking into it as an option.

Once you have the [standard] logs, any analyzer product should be able to 
provide the data you need. That is of course a downside to going with a 
consolidated product like Elron's. The log files are a proprietary format.


At 06:59 AM 3/27/00 -0800, TMGB wrote:
>You could read the log file into mysql if there is a delimiter, even a
>space, on each side of your URL in the log and do a query just on the
>url field using the keyword "distinct".  This can be done on linux or
>windows.  If you are using linux, there is a program called webalyzer
>which gives a similar output as the webtrends product and I think it is
>free but I'm not sure if you can show unique hits.
>
>Thomas
>
>Michael Dargan wrote:
> >
> > I'm using the Elron Internet Manager to gather stats about web usage by =
> > public and staff.  It's rather expensive and has many features that I =
> > don't need or want.  For example, I don't need to actually block or keep =
> > track of individual usage.  I really want to show how many unique sites =
> > have been visited over a period of time, the top 100 most popular sites =
> > and the busiest workstations.
> >
> > Does anyone have a cheap, reliable way to grab this traffic and pull =
> > reports out of it?
> >


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