Personal LogDoor User's Guide

Reference

How Personal LogDoor Works

Personal LogDoor communicates with personal Web sharing to obtain information about every access to a file or folder at the root of your personal Web server's folder. Personal LogDoor processes that access information, organizes and summarizes it by item, and presents it in a meaningful format. Processing is always done in real time.

When first run, Personal LogDoor registers with your personal Web server. From then on, your server will launch Personal LogDoor if it's not already running, and pass it information about the last access. If you ever quit Personal LogDoor, it deregisters from your server. You would need to manually launch Personal LogDoor to use it again. On the other hand, if you do not quit Personal LogDoor, but restart the machine, Personal LogDoor will remain registered and will be automatically invoked by your server on the next access. To summarize, Personal LogDoor is the monitor for your personal Web server; once you launch Personal LogDoor, it will always act as the monitor, unless you physically quit it.

Because of the way personal Web sharing communicates with Personal LogDoor, you should never move Personal LogDoor while it is running. If you wish to move it, quit Personal LogDoor, move it, and restart it.

Note that you can run Personal LogDoor without personal Web sharing being active. You might wish to do this to peruse your access data or write reports while the server is down. If you run Personal LogDoor without personal Web sharing being active, you will get a dialog warning you that personal Web sharing is not active, and giving you the sequence to properly restart personal Web sharing and Personal LogDoor. Specifically, when you are ready to restart personal Web sharing, you must quit Personal LogDoor, start personal Web sharing, then start Personal LogDoor. Not following this sequence may result in accesses not being logged.

The Status Window

When you launch Personal LogDoor, it opens the status window. On first launch, it appears as shown in Figure 1. (Note that your first window will not show data as Figure 1 does, since there will have been no accesses logged.)

Figure 1. Status Window, Short Form

This window provides a quick, easy display of information about accesses to personal Web sharing. Information is presented in this window in two ways:

• Last Access - This area contains information about the most recent access, or attempted access, to personal Web sharing. Specifically, you can see
  
  
  • the URL of your personal Web server
    
    
  • the date and time of day of the access
    
    
  • the status of the access
    
    
  • the number of bytes transferred
    
    
  • the URL (the pathname of the item from your personal Web server's root) of the item accessed
    
    
  • for relevant accesses:
    
    
    • the name of the user attempting access to an access-controlled item
      
      
    • referrer - the URL of the page, if any, on which the link resides that caused this access

The status item shows the status returned by your personal Web server for the last access. This will usually be one of the following:

• "OK" - no errors
  
  
• "Not found" - file not found
  
  
• "Access check" - normal part of accessing access-controlled pages (see the Errors section below)
  
  
• "Access violation" - access was attempted without proper user access privileges
  
  
• "Forbidden" - access was attempted on an inaccessible file (for example, not in the Web hierarchy)
  
  
• "Bad request" - improperly formatted request from the browser

If the status code returned by your personal Web server is not one of these common values, the numerical HTTP status code will be displayed. You can interpret these by consulting the HTTP specification. For a more complete discussion of errors, see the Errors section below.

• Graphs - Near the bottom of the status window are graphs of the number of hits and errors versus time, for the whole server. The graph covers a twelve hour period, in five minute increments. When you move the cursor over an element of the graph, the date, the time, and the number of hits and errors for that element appear directly below the graph. Note that errors also count as hits.
  

If you click on the triangle at the lower left of the status window, the window drops down to reveal more detailed information. See Figure 2.

Figure 2. Status Window, Long Form

There are two additional sources of information in the lower portion of the window:

• List - The main information display is a list of the total hits, bytes transferred, and access errors for each file and folder at the personal Web server's root. Errors also count as hits. Note that this is not a list of all files and folders at the Web server's root, but rather is a list of all files and folders at the Web server's root that have hits or errors. You can sort this summary access list by item name, or the number of hits, bytes or errors. To sort by a column, simply click on the appropriate column heading; an underlined heading is the one used for sorting. You can also specify the time period, such as "Access To Date," "Access This Month," etc. through the pop-up menu. The data for the server as a whole is shown in the "Total" line immediately above the list.
  
  
• List Item Details - You can get a more detailed display of a row in the list by selecting the row and then using the "Show Item Summary" item of the "Monitor" menu, or by double-clicking the row. You can select a row by clicking on it or by typing the first letter or letters of its name. You can get a more detailed display of the "Total" line immediately above the list by using the "Show Overall Summary" item of the "Monitor" menu, or by double-clicking that line.

You will notice several entries in the summary access list that do not correspond directly to your files or folders. They are:

• <default> - requests for the home page of the server, of the form "http://www.yourwebserver.com/"
  
  
• <Root errors> - requests which generated errors at the root level. See the Errors section below.
  
  
• PNF - folders opened via Apple's Personal Web Sharing's Personal NetFinder
  
  
• PNFIconGraphics - icons used by Personal NetFinder

Reports

Use the "Write Reports" item in the "Monitor" menu to create reports. By default, reports are written to a folder called "Output," which is located in the same folder as the Personal LogDoor application. Reports are written in both plain text and HTML formats. Alternatively, "Output" can be an alias to some other folder. If the folder pointed to by the "Output" alias is in your Web server's hierarchy, then reports are accessible over the Web (which is why they're also written in HTML format). If you make reports available over the Web, you may wish to control access to the report folder. For Apple's Personal Web Sharing, use the Web Sharing control panel and file sharing access privileges.

The folder where Personal LogDoor actually writes the reports will contain three items:

• "Overall.txt" - plain text summary report for the overall server
  
  
• "Overall.html" - HTML summary report for the overall server. This report has links to the reports contained within "Detail".
  
  
• "Detail" - a folder containing plain text and HTML report files for all folders at the root level of your server, plus the special entries <Root errors> and "PNFIconGraphics." Note that there are no reports for files at the root level.

The "Overall" report data will reflect the sort order and time frame displayed when the report was written. If you use a time frame other than "To Date," a "To Date" column will be inserted into the report.

You can customize Personal LogDoor's reports. If you place files named "Heading.txt" and "Heading.html" in the Personal LogDoor application folder, text in those files will be inserted near the top of the text- and HTML-formatted reports respectively. Sample Heading.html and Heading.txt files are included with Personal LogDoor.

Finally, you can add graphs to the reports to provide a quick visual interpretation of your data. When Personal LogDoor first creates the "Detail" folder, it puts a file "line.gif" in that folder. The contents of line.gif are used to draw horizontal bars in a second subcolumn under "Hits." Thus, each Hits column shows the number of hits and a bar representing that number. If line.gif is not present, the bars are not drawn and the second subcolumn is not included. If you wish, you can use your own line.gif.

Errors

One of the major benefits of Personal LogDoor is its ability to help you know of and track down bad links and possible access violations. Although there will be no specific information in the status window's list -- or in a report -- about individual errors, by looking at the list as a whole, there are a few techniques you can use to track down the sources of errors.

• Bad Links - One common type of error occurs when a file requested by a Web browser does not exist. This can happen through a bad link or a user mistyping a URL. If a user mistypes a URL, there's not much you can do about it. However, if the link exists on another page -- yours or someone else's -- Personal LogDoor can help you track it down. You can see these errors in the graphical display in the status window, and in the list in the lower part of the status window. If the error occurred in the last access, the "Last Access" line at the top left of the status window will give the URL of the file for which access was attempted, and the URL of the page, if there is one, from which the access was made. Additionally, by noting the error count of the items in the list, you can get a good feel for which particular files and folders are the targets of bad accesses. This should provide a clue as to where the accesses were being made from.
  
  Note that while valid accesses to items (files or folders) at the root level are logged to the item name, errors while attempting to access items at the root level may go to <Root errors> under certain conditions. Specifically, if there have been no valid accesses previously made to an item, the error for that item will be logged to <Root errors>. For example, if a user mistypes the name of a file or folder at the root level, the "Not found" error will go to <Root errors>. This is done so that mistyped URLs don't cause an excessive number of item entries to be displayed. If a root-level file of folder has ever had valid accesses, however, subsequent errors accessing that item will be logged to the entry for the item itself.
  
  
• Access Errors - Personal LogDoor reports two kinds of access errors: access checks and access violations. An access check is generated when any user tries to access an access-controlled page, whether they have access rights or not. This is because the initial request never contains the user name or password. Your personal Web server responds by sending an access error to the browser -- this error is caught by Personal LogDoor and displayed in the Last Access line as an "Access check," but it is not counted as an error. The browser then asks the user for a password and the request is resent with the password. If the user enters the wrong user name or password, the Web server will produce another access error, and this one is counted as an error by Personal LogDoor and displayed as an "Access violation." Access violations on files at the root level are displayed as described above in the Bad Links section.
  
  To be precise, if Personal LogDoor gets an access error from your personal Web server and there is no user field present in the request, the error is handled as an access check; it is displayed in the Last Access line but not counted as an error. If there is an access error with a user field, though, it is treated as an access violation; it is displayed and counted as an error.

Personal LogDoor's Data

All data displayed in the status window and written to reports is stored in the file "LogDoor Task", located in the same folder as the Personal LogDoor application.

Resetting the Data

To reset Personal LogDoor's data, use the "Clear Monitor Data" item in the "Monitor" menu. This will erase all existing data.

Making Personal Web Sharing Visible through AppleTalk

Personal Web sharing will often be run on networks which support both TCP/IP and AppleTalk. In such cases, Personal LogDoor can take advantage of the plug-and-play nature of AppleTalk to make finding and accessing such servers signficantly easier. To make your personal Web server available in this manner, simply select "Register with AppleTalk" from Personal LogDoor's "Monitor" menu. Assuming that AppleTalk is enabled on your Macintosh, your server will be registered with AppleTalk and will be accessible through the Chooser using the Macintosh name you have entered in the "Sharing Setup" control panel.

Once the registration option is selected in Personal LogDoor, your personal Web server will be automatically registered with AppleTalk every time Personal LogDoor is run. If Personal LogDoor is quit, however, your server will be deregistered, so you will probably want to keep Personal LogDoor running all the time. Additionally, you may want to put an alias to Personal LogDoor in your startup folder to ensure that it is run if your Macintosh is restarted. Be sure that Personal LogDoor starts after personal Web sharing. For Apple's Personal Web Sharing, this means making sure that the alias you create for Personal LogDoor comes alphabetically after the "Web Sharing" alias created by Personal Web Sharing.

For AppleTalk users to actually see and access your personal Web server through the Chooser, those users must install the Web Sharing Chooser Extension. An evaluation version of this Open Door Networks product is included with Personal LogDoor. Details of how to install, use and purchase the Extension are also included.

If at any time you wish to no longer have your personal Web server visible through AppleTalk while Personal LogDoor is running, you can simply select "Deregister with AppleTalk" from the "Monitor" menu. The server will be immediately deregistered, and Personal LogDoor will no longer perform such registration every time it is run.

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