I’ve been a long term user of Awstats for reporting on visitor traffic to my websites. Whilst it’s a little dated, it’s simplicity and reliance only on the web server logs makes it ideal for any application, including general websites such as blog, but also more specialised sites such as my package repositories which can’t make use of more sophisticated client-side Javascript tracking methods as files are being downloaded by non-browser clients.
Simple web 1.0 goodness. No fancy AJAX graphs here son!
That repository server in particular (repos.jethrocarr.com) is now pushing 20-40GB of traffic per month to around 2500-3000 servers. Unfortunately Awstats doesn’t differentiate between general purpose file grabbers and the Yum downloader for RPM-based distributions, and it makes it difficult to see if downloads are from machines vs mirror scripts scanning and re-downloading files.
I also run dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 – Awstats includes some useful GeoIP modules to lookup where user traffic comes from, but it doesn’t support mixed IPv4 and IPv6 by default and as my IPv6 traffic usage increases, this could be a problem as the “Unknown” country counter increases.
To fix this, I’ve written a patch for adding Yum user agent support and also merged in a patch by Sven Strickroth which adds a geoip6 module that does both IPv4 and IPv6 country lookups using the popular MaxMind GeoLite databases.
I’ve built packages for CentOS/RHEL/etc 5 & 6, which are available at my repositories at repos.jethrocarr.com. The awstats package I’ve built includes these two patches and also pulls in a current copy of MaxMind’s GeoIP database and required dependencies, so you’re all good to go immediately.
If you’re after the patches themselves, you can download them directly: