From: Eric Bush (eric@kitchen-sink.com)
Subject: ServerStat Update: Now Freeware
After 5+ years as a commercial product, ServerStat is now being released as
freeware. Some of you may have already seen the announcement on the WebStar
list but we wanted to contact you directly since not everyone may be on the
StarNine WebStar-talk listserve.
WebSite – The website for ServerStat is being re-done. The shell is there
now, but more will be added to this site to at least get the older support
information available. For now, you can download the 2.1 version and manual
as well as sign up for the new listserve.
The “official” site is:
http://www.kitchen-sink.com/serverstat/
The alternate site is:
http://ebush.dyndns.org/serverstat/
ListServe – Because of a relatively long delay in activity or serious
development I decided to purge the listserve to avoid sending a lot of
e-mail to folks who may not even have remembered they were on that list. If
you are interested in ServerStat discussions, you can subscribe to the
mailing list from the website or by sending a message to
mailto:serverstat-l@kitchen-sink.com?subject=subscribe
Since it is now a freeware product, there may be renewed interest in the
product and discussions that are not appropriate for other listserves can
be directed there. I will be monitoring the WebStar-talk mailing list and
will try to respond to messages there, but will actively watch messages to
the ServerStat listserve.
What’s New – In releasing the product as freeware, I didn’t just change the
old version number to 2.1 and re-release it. A number of improvements and
new features were added. For example, the [TABLES] report command now
allows you to specify some of the HTML properties like the border width,
cellspacing, font to use, font size, font color, and background color. New
commands for counting items in various lists have been added so you can
insert the number of days, domains, agents, subdomains, referers that are
in the report (line for line).
Memory management and speed were also addressed in this release.
Improvements in searching and storing the data while processing were the
biggest reasons for this improvement. Without DNS activity the speed is
about 2 times as fast as version 2.07.
Support for the new WebSTAR log tokens. Several new tokens have been added
to the log format options for WebSTAR since the last release of ServerStat.
While new log tokens don’t break ServerStat, it won’t report against new
tokens even if it looks like it might be a supported token. So, you can use
CS(USER-AGENT) instead of AGENT and report against the browser types used
to access you site.
Manual – The manual was updated for the 2.1 release and is available in
Adobe Acrobat format. It requires version 4 of Acrobat Reader to view the
manual which has been bookmarked throughout for much easier reference use.
The manual can be downloaded separately from the downloads area of the web
site.
Scripting – No new functionality with scripting, but a problem effected
some systems that would not allow the scripting engines to read resource
information from the application on systems after MacOS 8.6.
Older Macintoshes – I no longer have a 68K Macintosh. With the 2.1 release
I have included a PowerPC version and a 68K version. While the 68K version
runs on my G3’s I have to honestly say I can’t test for the 68K platform
any longer. I will try and resolve any issues found but my ability to do so
will be somewhat limited compared to PowerPC, G3, and G4 machines.
Year 2000 – There were issues around one of the date libraries we used and
the Year 2000. While the program didn’t crash it would give some typical
Year 2000 odd results like 1900 activity dates and the like. There is an
appendix in the manual that gives more details around the Year 2000
updates, just basically, if the log contains a 2-digit year we use a
sliding scale (65 and before are considered Year 2000 and above, 66 and
later are 1900 dates). If a 4-digit year is in the log as YYYY-MM-DD they
work fine as expected. The DATE range commands in ServerStat resolve to
4-digit years now. If you enter (or have older settings files with 2-digit
years they will still function and be updated to 4-digit years based on the
sliding scale). You have 65 years to have the dates converted to 4-digit
years before unexpected results would occur 🙂
Sorry to be long winded here… I want to thank everyone who has been part
of the ServerStat community over the years. I am not going away, nor is
ServerStat. I just want more people to be able to take advantage of
ServerStat. Analog seems to be popular because it is free. I guess we will
see if the same excitement can be generated if there are two or more free
log analysis tools.
Enjoy,
Eric Bush
mailto:eric@kitchen-sink.com