Re: reluctant farewell

[Ken Weingold <hazmat@hellrot.org>]

On Sat, Jan 27, 2001, Nathan E Norman wrote:
> So configuring apache to log to an sql database and writing scripts to
> build graphs on the fly would do the same thing, right?  I'm
> interested in working on something like this; my former employer
> wanted stats updated weekly so I wrote a little perl script to do just
> that with webalizer (we logged all the data to one logfile since I
> didn't want to deal with 1 or two logfiles for each virtual host).
> As it turned out this setup made generation of webstats as simple as
> adding the virtual host to the apache config; the rest happened
> "automagically".

Well, Webtrends is running on its own machine, not on the actual web
server.  Resources.  So it goes every so often through FTP to download
the log files from where it left off last time.  That is the
"real-time".  And people like the calendar to view stats for any day,
week, month, quarter, or year.  You just click on the span you want.
It's done through java.  I hate java, but that's what it is.  All
works rather well, too.  And besides, they want the name.  Webtrends.
You know how that is.  It's almost a non-issue with customers.

> Hmm.  Having experienced WebTrends on the NT platform I can understand
> your frustration.  However, I must point out that scolding a rep from
> a company that isn't too sure about its linux support is not the best
> thing you can do for linux advocacy.  It's far better to "encourage"
> the rep to support other linux platforms, perhaps by pointing out the
> reasons that you choose the other platform.  Sorry for sounding like a
> Dale Carnegie type; I did a lot of yelling at sales reps and customers
> in my day :)  I can honestly say that the reasoned approach would have
> worked better.

Well, I think I was nicer than I sounded in my last message.  I did
explain why I prefered Debian over Red Hat and why I personally did
not like Red Hat.  I really was quite nice about it, but she did I
guess end up sounding more confused than dejected.  I am sure most of
what I said to her was Greek.  


-Ken