[realprogrammers hosting] Automated mailing of HTTP error logs

[hosted@realprogrammers.com]

Hi folks,

Happy New Year! Here's a bulletin about a small improvement in the (web)
hosting fun here.

Summary:

For those with websites here, you'll all now be getting your web error
logs daily, reliably. Sent to webmaster@<your domain>. Mail me for
fixes, updates, questions.

Detail:

For some time now I've been sporadically forwarding on daily web error
logs to people so they can fix their sites in a reasonably timely
fashion, while not having to futz with looking at error logs manually -
mail's so much easier.

This was a cute, easy hack at the time: with a simple addition to the
default system log rotation scripts (logrotate) it would mail the log to
a certain address. Unfortunately that destination was fixed: me, who
didn't forward them consistently. I've now gone and done this properly
(i.e. written a perl script :-) and the error log will now go to the
configured Apache ServerAdmin each night without relying on me to bounce
it -- thanks to Earle for chatting about this and confirming my general
sanity (er, no, wait..).

(ServerAdmin appears on error pages generally; previously they were
almost all webmaster @ realprogrammers.com but I've set them to
each of you.)

What's sent is the errors for the day. If there were no errors you don't
get pestered by an email. So the easy way is simply to fix the errors --
and delight your users with an error-free web experience!

ServerAdmin is now mostly set to webmaster@<the domain being hosted> -
if you'd like it to go elsewhere lemme know! Everyone so far has wanted
this despite me initially worrying it might be a bit annoying -- I'm
happy to turn it off individually though. Of course, your visitors &
search engines will think you suck with the errors, but hey ;-)

You may seen some spurious errors like FormMail.pl attacks (looking for
spam gateways) - there are still hundreds of these thanks to the
hopelessness of the guy who wrote the script way back and then failed to
ever fix it. You can ignore these; they aren't your problem, just people
opportunistically probing. For the most part I have set the default
cgi-bin to an area that contains a "honeypot" that will catch these
attempts. Mail me however if you get these slipping by and I'll set up a
'pot or devnull them.


Have a great 2003,
Paul


-- 
Paul Makepeace ....................................... http://paulm.com/

"What is the power draw of a typical 34" plasma display screen? I've
 been asking myself that same question for years."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/