Webalizer/AWStats

Hey all,
I've been thinking more and more recently about moving away from the default Analog reporting provided by Dreamhost and I have a few questions.

First - in your opinion, which analyzer is better and why?
Second - how difficult is it to install either of the two, keeping in mind that I am a complete SSH/Command Line noob?
Third - if I figure I could manage the install with some really explicit notes on the SSH commands and steps needed (I'm not a complete idiot, most of the time), would someone be willing to provide them for me?

I've read the wiki entries for both installs, and I'm not 100% certain that I could manage the install with the information provided. I know it can't be as hard as it seems, and I'm definitly interested in learning a little about working from the Command Line, it's just that I've never done it before and I really don't want to destroy anything on my account.

Any input would be exteremly appreciated!!!!


================================
I'd give my right arm to be ambidexterous!

After about 4 hours of sitting here, messing around with things and getting my first taste of telnet and crontabs, i've successfully managed to get AwStats running (on 2 of my domain names even)!

My question now becomes a matter of what log file I should be looking for, and if I only update once a day (@ 3am) do i run the possibility of losing any visits?

This question arises because I try and update manually and I get an error message saying that 'Couldn't open server log file "/home/username/logs/domain.com/http/access.log.0" : No such file or folder'. Am I doing something wrong? Do I have to change the conf file to look at a different log file?

Again, I appreciate the input!
Time for bed though..... TGIF, only one more day of work this week


================================
I'd give my right arm to be ambidexterous!

/home/username/logs/domain.com/http/access.log.0 should always work as long as you have properly replaced 'username' and 'domain.com' with appropriate values.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

Dallas, much appreciated for that tip. I've been able to get this to work as it should (I guess) so far today with a little bit of tweaking, but now I have two other questions.

1. Is it possible to have awstats process the logs from the last few days/months? If yes, where can I find the files and what do I have to do with them?

2. I think my crontab is written incorrectly, the process doesn't appear to be running as it should. Is my syntax correct -

30 2 * * * perl /home/username/awstats/tools/awstats_buildstaticpages.pl -config=mydomain.com -update -awstatsprog=/home/username/awstats/awstats.pl -dir=/home/username/mydomain.com/stat/

all on one line of course, no space at the beginning?

To my understanding, this should run the update process every 24 hours, at 2:30am server time (6:30am my time), but whne I check my stats it just shows the last time that I manually updated them from the command line.

Thanks again!


================================
I'd give my right arm to be ambidexterous!

Note that you don't need the 'perl' in that command, though it won't hurt anything.

That looks ok there. I didn't verify the sytntax for the buildstaticpages tool.

You can have the output emailed to you by adding a line like this at the beginning:

MAILTO=myemailaddress@mydomain.com

Everyone should put lines like that in their crontabs to ensure they get any relevant output where they expect. By default it will send it via email to the user account running the cron job but that is not always the one being used as a mailbox.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder