Subject: xferstats

From: Gregory A Lundberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:18:19 -0400 (EDT)

I've got a copy of Phil Schwan's xferstats version 1.15 from November of
last year.  I've seen references to newer versions on the mailing list.
Problem: I get 'no route to host' when I try to ftp to Phil's off.net
machines .. it looks to me like there's a firewall stopping me.  Question:
does anyone know of any other sites for his package, or are you just
having some problems this week Phil?

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Gregory A Lundberg		Senior Partner, VRnet Company
1441 Elmdale Drive              [email-masked]
Kettering, OH 45409-1615 USA    1-800-809-2195

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From: Phil Schwan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 13:43:24 -0400

> having some problems this week Phil?

Actually, the modes of distribution -have- changed, and since I'm already
mailing the list, I'll tell you about my plans too.

Since there are some rather nasty firewalls in place (blame Time-Warner, but
they'll go away when I get to CMU August 18th :), you need to use one of these
two URLs:

ftp://sod.off.net:211/pub/xferstats   (that's port 211 for the URL-impaired)
http://xferstats.off.net:8080

On the 'xferstats.off.net' site is a very quick update of what's going on with
xferstats, and I'll duplicate parts and add a bit here.

I've been working on a complete rewrite of xferstats since very early this
year.  A couple of statistics about my progress:

* xferstats v1.17 on a 9M logfile took over 15 minutes and ate over 300M ram
* xferstats v2.00 on the same log took under 8.5 seconds and 9M ram

xferstats v2.00 is threaded and tested on multiprocessor systems.  Some
additional threading may be added to certain functions at a later date, but
for now I'm quite happy with it.  The above v2.00 number was generated with a
non-threaded binary.

xferstats v2.00 has a working 'configure' script, and therefore builds more
easily on more systems.  xferstats has been tested on more systems as well
(I've finally gotten people interested enough to give me accounts on strange
machines :)

xferstats now generates the following reports: daily, hourly, monthly, by day
of the month (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc), by day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc),
by individual file, by directory (variable depth), by host, by top-level
domain, and by file size.

While xferstats doesn't currently know how to parse anything other than
wu-ftpd and ncftpd logs, it's very easy to drop new log parsing functions in
place (although it's not very easy to connect them to the rest of the
program).  I'll be looking to make this bit easier once I've managed to get a
beta finished.

With that out of the way, I should tell you that I'm very close--after 6
months of more or less steady work (although it was slow at times because of
classes), I'm nearing the point where I'm happy with it and can release a
beta.  My to-do list before I do so is:

* Fix ncftpd log parsing (shouldn't take more than an hour, if my head is on
  straight at the time :)
* Clean up the way it handles little problems (like empty logfiles, corrupt
  logfiles, no data left after a logfile parse, etc...)
* Update the documentation and man page.  This may take an entire day or two,
  there have been an amazing number of changes.
* Perhaps I'll re-do the command line argument parsing code, but it's not top
  on my list, and may wait until I have a beta released

July 1st would be a great date to shoot for.  I'll go ahead and mail the
wu-ftpd list and update the web page when a beta goes out.  If any of you are
actually interested enough that you want to see a mailing list, drop me a note
([email-masked]) and if there's demand, I'll throw one up (but I can't
imagine it's that interesting of a project :).

As for further development, ideally, it'll go something like this:
* Beta goes out
* People mail me with bugs and/or patches
* I fix bugs
* After a while with no bugs, xferstats is stable (whoopie!)
* Release stable xferstats
* People send patches and ideas

And that last step is the one that will make me quite happy.  Every once in a
while someone mails me with an idea, but I've never received a single patch.
It may be because the code isn't documented enough, and that's certainly one
of my larger tasks once I send a beta out, but if you can find it in your
heart to save me some time by sending a patch, they're always welcome.

This bloody thing is long enough...if you've taken the time to read it, you're
more interested than most, thanks :)

Phil

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'The ultimate seal on any software product is not any sort of kite mark or
standards conformance certificate, it's that label that says, "Destruction
tested by Alan Cox.... Survived."' -- Clive Dolphin (3Com PDD)