The other day I came across a situation where a web-server was getting hammered, and we needed to know who the offend(ers) were. While watching a logfile tail by at high speeds is always fun, we wanted to be able to sort the web-server access log and find top users, to be able to narrow down where the traffic was coming from. While we don’t want to block users that want to access our data, sometimes we need to throttle things back so one requester doesn’t overwhelm all the available bandwidth and make the site unusable for others. So after some playing around and digging on Google, we came up with a nice, succinct one liner to do this, here it is:
cat /path/to/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
At the 
As a IT contractor I’m enjoying giving my opinion when asked, and sometimes even when I’m not asked; I have the confidence to be open and honest with everyone and want them to know that. Because of this I’ve been getting to do things I otherwise would not have since they would not have known I was interested or experienced in such things. One of the things I was hired for was to setup Apache on Linux to work with their web instances. It’s been fun, and while I’ve used Apache for over 10 years, there’s always new things to learn. Recently they asked for my opinion on ‘support’ options for Apache. Keeping in mind, they already have support for the hardware and support for the Linux distribution, they still think they need another support channel for Apache. To me this a big waste of money and have somewhat made my case to them. While I understand their position that this support is a way to cover themselves if Apache ‘breaks’, the fact that this software is Open Source has to change the way they have traditionally considered support.
Home