I have read in some web sites that they know who has been visiting their web sites, at least if it ends with gov. it may indicate the government may be monitoring your site. How can I find out who has been visiting my web site? Is there a software program I have to purchase? What are the steps to find out. I am not very good with computer so please give details . I don't have a popular site, but none the less I like to find out if possible. Is there a web site(s) which discusses how to do it? Thanks.

-- Judy (judyw@xyz.net), December 14, 1999

Answers

You can have your ISP set you up with Webtrends or some other similiar reporting software......or if you know what you are doing you can use Scripting to capture the IP Address of those visiting your site using Perl in the CGI-BIN or VBSCript/JScript in ASP on an NT platform.........

-- Craig (craig@ccinet.ab.ca), December 14, 1999.

If you have access to the web server at the shell level, you can access the logs directly. On Redhat Linux, for example, the default system setting is to store logs in /etc/httpd/logs/access_log. The file looks like:

208.219.77.29 - - [14/Dec/1999:14:12:52 -0500] "HEAD /minutes/1997/minutes.19970403.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 0 141.218.20.62 - - [14/Dec/1999:14:14:45 -0500] "GET /~james HTTP/1.0" 404 200 141.218.20.62 - - [14/Dec/1999:14:14:59 -0500] "GET /~jason HTTP/1.0" 404 200

The first element in the log is the IP number of the requester. The next part is obviously the date. The third element is the type of request, the document requested, and the transfer method. The last two elements are the error numbers. 404 is document not found. 200 is ok (no error).

If you are trying to find out who's been accessing your server, there are Perl scripts which can collate and analyze this data file, showing where they are coming from, the averages on hits/hour, etc.

-- Tim the Y2K nut (tmiley@yakko.cs.wmich.edu), December 14, 1999.

Try eXTReMe Tracking

It's free and not too hard to set up, IMO. I've got it on my "radical" political philosophy website and have noticed Dept. of Justice and Treasury IP addresses from time to time.

-- Jim Morris (jim_morris@hushmail.com), December 14, 1999.