Archive for July, 2010

Awstats with Apache and mod_rewrite

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

I recently setup a new Awstats install and used mod_rewrite to make it easier to view web stats. Using the following configuration within a virtual host declaration, you can simply make requests in the following format:


http://awstats/$CONFIG/$YEAR/$MONTH/$DAY/

This is assuming that you run daily rollups.

  ServerAlias awstats

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/awstats/awstats.pl [NC]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/icon               [NC]
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/awstats/awstats.pl?databasebreak=day&day=$4&month=$3&year=$2&config=$1 [L,NE]

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Bash tip: Print begin and end timestamp on apache logs…

Friday, July 9th, 2010

This morning I needed to audit some log files that I had recently processed through AWstats and received a report that there was a discrepancy in the data. The complaint was that one day was missing. I used the following bash script to print out the start and end timestamp of each log file:

for file in $( ls -tr *.gz ) ;
do
  BEGIN=$(zcat ${file} | head -n 1 | awk '{print $4}');
  END=$(zcat ${file} | tail -n 1 | awk '{print $4}');
  echo "${file} - ${BEGIN} - ${END}";
done

Note that each log file was named uniquely by web server and logrotate number, eg webserver1.access_log.XX.gz.

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System Administrator Technical Interviews

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

I have had the opportunity to interview many candidates over the past few months and have a few tips:

  • When indicating that you have VMware experience, clearly indicate which features you have experience with. I have interviewed many candidates who claim to be experts on VI3/vSphere and yet have never used clustering or shared storage.
  • When asked about rating yourself from 1-5 or 1-10, make sure you understand which side is the proficient side and give an example of what you think is proficient in a particular area.

My methodology is to ask the interviewee to rate themselves and then ask them what that rating means to them. If they rate themselves a 4 out of 5 with general Linux system administration, I then ask them to give me a few examples of what somebody who has a 4/5 rating would be able to do. I then ask them questions based on that assessment. If you can’t win on those terms, you typically can’t win.

It is not my desire to stump somebody in an interview, I would prefer to ask them questions about what they have done in the past and get into a good dialogue about things they are familiar with.  Do your interviewer a favor and be very clear on the resume and during the interview process.

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