Out with the old…

I deleted all my old server logs today. Roughly 2 years worth of information about all those who requested information from my web server. Sure, half (or more) was unintelligible Nimda and Code Red crap, but there was a sizable amount of legitimate stuff as well. I’d say I averaged 1.5 GigaBytes of data transferred per month over the last year, and around 1GB/mo before that.

So why did I ditch it? To make room? Well, yes, sort of. The logs were quite large, but not unwieldy. I just finished setting up analog to monitor all three virtual hosts now being served, and I wanted a clean run. No errors from old log formats, etc… Wipe the slate clean.

One thought on “Out with the old…”

  1. A quick look at the error logs shows that 169 of 180 lines in that log are requests for cmd.exe or root.exe. Probably some infected desktop on an AOL dialup that’sonly on for a couple minutes at a time. Poor sap doesn’t know how lame he is. Wasting all that bandwidth…

    So what are the other 11 entries? 7 references to a non-existent favicon.ico file and 2 references to a page that I already fixed (index.html –> index.php) and a single dead link. I fixed the link, and made a backup.

    To view the number of lines in you log file:
    $wc -l error.log

    to view the number of lines including a request for an exe file:
    $grep -c exe error.log

    to view those fiew lines that aren’t requests from damn nimda infected windowz boxes:
    grep -v exe error.log

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