Sun Microsystems Netscape Enterprise Server, Administrator'S Manual

Page: 189 / 532

Chapter 8, Understanding Log Files 189
Setting Log Preferences
Log rotation is initialized at server startup. If rotation is turned on, Enterprise
Server creates a time-stamped access log file and rotation starts at server
startup.
Once the rotation starts, Enterprise Server creates a new time stamped log file
when there is a request that needs to be logged to the access log file and it
occurs after the prior-scheduled “next rotate time”.
Note
You should archive the server logs before running the log analyzer.
To archive log files and to specify whether to use the Internal daemon method
or the cron based method, use the Archive Log Files page in the Server
Manager.
Setting Log Preferences
During installation, an access log file named
access
was created for the
server. You can customize access logging for any resource by specifying
whether to log accesses, what format to use for logging, and whether the server
should spend time looking up the domain names of clients when they access a
resource.
Server access logs can be in Common Logfile Format, flexible log format, or
your own customizable format. The Common Logfile Format is a commonly
supported format that provides a fixed amount of information about the server.
The flexible log format allows you to choose (from Enterprise Server) what to
log. A customizable format uses parameter blocks that you specify to control
what gets logged. For a list of customizable format parameters, see the
NSAPI
Programmer’s Guide for Enterprise Server 4.0.
Once an access log for a resource has been created, you cannot change its
format unless you archive it or create a new access log file for the resource.
You can specify logging preferences using The Log Preferences Page in the
Server Manager, or you can manually configure the following directives in the
obj.conf
file. In
obj.conf
, the server calls the function
flex-init
to
initializes the flexible logging system and the function
flex-log
to record
request-specific data in a flexible log format. To log requests using the common
log file format, the server calls
init-clf
to initialize the Common Log
subsystem which is used if
obj.conf
, and
common-log
to record request-
specific data in the common log format (used by most HTTP servers).