If you're at Verio, do you look at your raw logs?

[Randall]

If I'm not the only ShopSite user left on Verio's Hosting 2000 ("Signature") shared-hosting plan, I'd sure like to know how the rest of you are making sense of its raw log system. The following has me stymied:

* There's a separate compressed (.gz) log for each day, distinguished by a number in the filename (e.g. access_log.18).
* The log files are kept on the Verio server for only 90 days, so to retain their data, they must be downloaded.
* Every day, all the filenames' numbers increment by one, so the zipped log files you downloaded yesterday won't correspond to the ones you download today.
* The file inside each zipped file is always named "access_log.0" (even if the gz file's name is, say, ".18"), so during the chore of running each file through an unzip program, all the uncompressed files would overwrite each other.

Is there a unzip program that can batch these files without overwriting?
My Webtrends analyzer can read .gz files without unzipping, but even then, I'd have to rename every file just to save them without overwriting.

Is such a logging system inherent in the server, or something Verio alone set up?

Support's only answer is "well, you'd have to write a program."

When the store was on their now-discontinued Bronze plan, the system was sensible -- one log file uniquely named for each month. I have old data going back years. Now I'm virtually in the dark.

[loren_d_c]

Is such a logging system inherent in the server, or something Verio alone set up?

Both. It's a pretty standard log rotation pattern, but it is also configurable. On a standardized system like their Signature platform they may not be able to change it for you, however on one of their VPS or MPS platforms you would probably have full control over the rotation schedule, etc.

-Loren

[Randall]

I don't feel we need customization, just a usable system. So far, nobody at Verio has been able to explain how to use this one. In fact, they've effectively refused.

I'd think a standard system would have some sort of standard procedure, but I can't imagine it, nor any reason, other than laziness, or maybe a little less server chugging, for Verio to switch to this. For years on their Bronze Plan, it was pretty much a no-brainer. (As in "no brain required," not "no brain used.")

Maybe I'm a dunce. Somebody please enlighten me?