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On a huge demand of our merchants, I have finished the advanced logging features of Tradebit today. The problem with logging in our case is, that we have serveral thousand merchants hosting files they offer for free and they sell. The statistics for the files on sale is simple, because we can count that with the sales entries. But for the free files, we can NOT dig through serveral text files on different cluster nodes.

The solution: Apache logs with MySQL!

In order to do that, you must follow these steps (on Linux):

1. install the module for Apache, if not already done
2. create a central database with the appropriate table (you can switch on “auto” in the module config, which does that for you)
3. add the lines for logging in your apache httpd.confs

My setup looks like this:

[root@w1 root]# ll /etc/httpd/modules/mod_log*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        28969 Mar 14  2005 /etc/httpd/modules/mod_log_sql_mysql.so
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        62256 Mar 14  2005 /etc/httpd/modules/mod_log_sql.so
and

[root@w1 root]# grep SQL /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
 LogSQLTransferLogTable access_log
 LogSQLTransferLogFormat AbHhMmRSsTUuv
 

It is important, that you test out the logging manually, before you restart the servers! Log into the database from remote like OutOfOrder shows it in the documentation!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.