PERL CGI Tutorial
for Writing Interactive Form Scripts

Access Log and Error Codes

Access Log

The access log can be a valuable tool in the management of your web site.

It can tell you:

• what pages are not functioning properly.
• where your traffic is coming from.
• what pages are visited the most.
• if you are visited by robot spiders.
• if someone bookmarks your site.
• your peak days and hours of traffic.

You can get some of this information through a stat service, but the really interesting stuff you will have to do yourself.

For instance if you see a request for a file named favicon.ico, it means someone bookmarked your site using an Explorer browser.

If you see a request for robot.txt or robots.tx it may mean that you were visited by a search engine spider.

Contents

If you see a lot of 304 status codes it means that users are bookmarking and revisiting your site.

If you have a most wanted response by your users, you can study the path that each user took to reach that response.

For example if your mwr is for a user to download a file, you would study the path each took before downloading and look for a pattern.

This could help you to enhance the content of the pages that were accessed and eliminate the unused.

Error Codes

The Apache server will report errors and status by a numerical code in the access log.

The most common are:

• 200 - OK
• 204 - No Response
• 206 - Incomplete Transaction
• 301 - Moved Permanently
• 302 - Found
• 303 - See Other
• 304 - Revisit to Cached Page
• 307 - Temporary Redirect
• 400 - Bad Request
• 401 - Unauthorized request
• 403 - Forbidden
• 404 - Not Found
• 405 - Not Allowed
• 408 - Request timed out
• 500 - Internal server error
• 503 - Service unavailable
• 504 - Gateway timed out

Take immediate action when you see the codes marked in red appearing in your access log on your internet web space..