The Webalizer

by John Sandercock

OS/2 is a great platform for building Web sites. Previous articles in extended attributes have described OS/2 Web servers, HTML editors, graphics editors, firewalls, ftp clients, and HTML validators. All the tools you need to create, maintain and browse Web sites are available under OS/2—which is as it should be, because the Web has been good to OS/2 users.

Another useful Web utility, which has been ported to OS/2, is Webalizer, written by Bradford L. Barrett <brad at mrunix.net>, distributed under the GNU General Public License, and compiled for OS/2 by <ABlankerts at freepoint.de>. Webalizer analyzes and presents a tremendous amount of information (in tables and graphs) which Apache and other Web servers routinely capture, but which is extremely tedious to sift through without such a tool.

Webalizer was designed to be run from a Unix command line prompt or as a cron job. In its OS/2 incarnation, Webalizer is a text-mode native OS/2 application. It requires the EMX Libs of Version 0.9d or later. Several command line options can modify the results, and configuration files can be used, but the default settings provide a great deal of useful information.

The format of the command line (in the English OS/2 version) is:

webalizer.exe.en [options ...] [log-file]

For me, using Webalizer is a three-step operation. First, I transfer access_log via ftp from the Apache server to my local PC. The file is deposited in the directory where I installed The Webalizer. Then I run webalizer.exe.en access_log from an OS/2 window, which takes less than two seconds. Finally, I open Netscape to view the results of the analysis.

By default, Webalizer produces an html file for each month in which activity was logged, and a summary file with hyperlinks to the more detailed monthly files. The summary file created from the access log file shows daily averages and monthly totals of hits, files, pages, and visits.

It also shows monthly totals of kilobytes transferred. The monthly files show, in addition, daily and hourly hits, pages and visits, totals of every response code generated by the server, the top 30 URLs served, the top 10 entry and exit pages, and the top 30 addresses to access the server.

Webalizer can be downloaded from mrunix.net or from Hobbes in the pub/os2/apps/internet/www/util directory. As of version 1.3, the zip file unpacks two executables, one in English and one in German.