I’ve spent the past couple of evenings fixing things on my webserver. I’ve been watching the logs for the past several days and noticed a number of small items that I could fix. I also decided to start gathering usage statistics so I could see who is accessing the blog and what they are accessing. Hopefully I’ve got it all put together correctly!! Making sure that the statistics are run before the logfiles get rotated is kind of important.

I’ve been quite frustrated at figuring how to look at only certain lines in one of my log files. I’d like to display only those lines that don’t have anywhere in the line the word ‘vsftpd’. Outside of writting a program to do this, I’m not figuring out how to do this with any standard programs like grep. It’s fairly straightforward to print lines with specific text patterns, but to exclude certain lines? That has turned out to be a challenge!