Doh.

So I looked at the webserver.log and webct.log. This wasn’t the first time I’ve looked at web server logs for users who were not logged in, so my plan was just use something this to get the session id. (The username, date, and time would vary.)

SESSIONID=`grep username webserver.log* | grep 2010-08-31 | grep 16:0[78]:[0-5] | awk -F\  ’{print $5}’`

Then use this to get the web browser.

WEBBROWSER=`grep $SESSIONID webserver.log* | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’`

Then use this to look at anything with the same browser.

grep -A 50 $SESSIONID webserver.log* | grep -A 50 $WEBBROWSER

Yeah, I know this was reeeaaaallly hokey. The web browser could be another user. The right one might not be the next one. In this case, I was dealing with a development server, so I was more confident than normal the next action would be my user.

So the logout.dowebct had an HTTP code of 200 and a GET action. The next one was a logout.dowebct with an HTTPD code of 200 and a POST action. Bingo! The user was trying to login on a logout page. No error.

Looked in webct.log for the time and there was no error for either logout. The user had a login just seconds before the first one had the familiar “invalid gotoid” which is supposedly okay. So the logs were a dead end.

Mystified by these results, I pulled up LiveHTTPHeaders and logged out and logged in again in where it failed and another institution in development where it did not fail. The failing one was sending the login to logout.dowebct. The successful one sent it to authenticateUser.dowebct.

So I was back to thinking it was the custom login page again. Over a year ago, since I have a properties file with all the relevant data, I wrote a script to generate a custom login page templates with the values filled into them for all our institutions. I hypothesized if the problem was something in the HTML, then replacing the school’s custom login page with this template at just the logout page, ought to fix the issue. It did.

Finally, I pulled up WinMerge to compare good and bad files and found the form tag contained a widget in the name attribute only when processing the logout URI. The widget was replaced with a correct value at logonDisplay. WTH? When the same HTML file used at the logonDisplay and logout URIs, they behave very differently in processing the widget. How could this be true?  The System Administrator Guide (page 384) confirmed only a single widget works at the logout URL and not this one. Guess this means the Blackboard response would be this is behaving as designed.

Ah, well. We figured out over a year ago these widgets create problems for us. Guess that is still true.

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Typically one-off updates from Blackboard has us run the updateWebctEar to replace classes in the war file. In a nutshell it…

1. opens the ear
2. opens the war
3. updates the class at the path
4. regenerates the war
5. regenerates the ear

Simple enough by hand, but very convenient in a script. I was glad when Bb gave us this functionality.

cd $WL_DOMAIN
./webct.sh updateWebctEar __some_class.class webct.war/WEB-INF/path/to/class

Verifying that this is in the Ear file is rather easy, but it takes a while manually. Also, one of the steps is to open the ear then search the webct.war. Well, the managed nodes cache the Ear so it kind of saves a step to look there. We run 14 clusters and worry about inconsistencies between various development clusters and between development and production. Plus, as this is a sanity check, why not check all of them? (Also, we use dsh, so checking all 140 production nodes with one command and not having to login to each saves the most time.)

The command…

1. changes directories to a location in the cache area,
2. confirms the location
3. uses the Java ARchive (JAR) tool to list (-t) verbosely (-v) the webct.war file (-f)

All put together…

cd$WL_DOMAIN/servers/node_name_regex/tmp/_WL_user/webct/
&& pwd && $JAVA_INSTALL/bin/jar -tvf */webct.war WEB-INF/path/to/class/__some_class.class

The output looks something like below. The time stamp appears to be when the server administrator added the file to the

118864 Fri Jul 23 11:25:42 EDT 2010 WEB-INF/path/to/class/__some_class.class

I’m thinking this could also be useful to scan for what updates the nodes have in the War just after we’ve installed it.

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Select a Date Range for the Report

Including here the most recent time the tracking was processed (which the application already displays to the server administrator in background jobs) would help the instructor know whether the data is as recent as 4:00 am or 1:00pm.

Maybe when Tracking will run again ought to be displayed to the instructor so he or she knows it will run within the hour or the next morning. That might cut down on instructors running it again and again expecting it to magically show data which won’t be available until many hours later.

Administrators some times have to pick the best operational time to run Tracking. We have direct login checks running several times per hour. When Tracking is run every hour and these checks run at the same time, the time these direct login checks took spiked. Users also complained about poor performance. So we have these run in the wee hours of the morning when users are not generally on the system.

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Besides, CE/Vista isn’t designed for administrators to assist users. Administrator roles are just to manage availability, access, and settings. It just happens that by having the ability to enroll our account(s) we can go into a section and see what the users see in many cases.

This got me thinking…. There is no official support role at the section context in CE/Vista. At best administrators can place users they control into the section to replicate the issue which can only act like other normal users. The normal roles are designer, instructor, student, auditor, and teaching assistant. Because a support role was never created, there are not any built-in useful tools for diagnosing and addressing problems the users may encounter. Instead all that work happens by those with access to the database. A couple years ago Georgia Tech gave a presentation on the support panel they created for T-Square which was designed for helping them overcome common issues in Sakai.

In CE/Vista,administrators have to rely on self-reporting (usually unreliable) or taking over accounts to see what legitimately they should be able to know to help solve problems. For example:

A student reports he could not see a section in the class list. An administrator’s verification is to check the enrollment in either the section or user views, but there is very little confidence this means anything. The student could have hidden the class, the start-end time could have briefly blipped, etc.

Step one of problem solving is identifying the problem. When there are dozens of potential problems without any way of narrowing down the field, administrators will rightly desire more access to the system’s nooks and crannies to see what is really happening. Because it doesn’t exist in the web pages served, they look at the data stored on the web and database servers to better understand. (Really, though something like Coradiant might help here by going back to see the HTML the server delivered to the student.)

“With great power comes responsibility.” Administrators are already very powerful and can do really scary things. The ability to act as any user? Would need to be kept in a log so employees who abuse this power can be terminated quickly and easily. Even the ability to see anything other users can see could be horrible if poorly implemented.

A former boss had a difficult time with a faculty member who often accused this boss of reading the faculty’s email. The evidence was emails the faculty member didn’t remember reading had been marked as read. The huge assumptions were: 1) the faculty member would remember having read it, 2) the only people capable are this boss and the faculty member, and 3) there were not automated rules to mark the email as read. All this because someone mentioned to the faculty member the people in IT would be able to read email. Imagine the ire if faculty thought administrators could do things as them in the learning management system….

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Maybe if enough clients complain, then Blackboard will start moving in the direction of supporting 11g? I’ve heard rumors of people already running 11g.

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First run of Blackboard CE/Vista 8 Service Pack 3 Hoftfix 1 installer on a single install gave me:

Installation error. Cannot install Java as target directory already exists – /path/to/node/jdk150_13

The installer hung because it went to do a mkdir and the directory was there. It should have abandoned installing Java and moved on to the next task. Instead, it gave me an incomplete install.

No biggie. I moved the existing Java directory out of the way and moved the backup copy of the installation directory back in place. Ran the installer again. This time it failed on a new error:

Installation error. java.util. zip.ZipException: No such file or directory

Turns out the files it needed to do this JDK install were not provided in the package. Luckily everything was in the SP3 installer (why it had been there in the first place). Copied those files into where the installer had sought them. Did the same backout again. Ran the installer again.

Installation completed successfully.

Amy thinks other clients reported this same issue only affected single installs when this hotfix was released and people started using it. We didn’t pay much attention because we don’t normally do single installs.

BTW: There’s not enough difference between  COMPLETE and INCOMPLETE to catch the attention of a person while the installer output is throwing 20 lines a second to the screen. FAILED would be better.

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Tests after applet patch in development reported chat failures. Chat uses an applet, so I was concerned and investigated the problem. The usual culprits were not affected.

1. setEnv.sh had WEBCT_CONFIG_OPTIONS set to start chat on correct nodes.
2. customconfig/ChatServer-config.xml had SSL key in correct location.
3. SSL key was the correct key.
4. SocketServer logs were not rolling every minute.

So chat looked correctly setup on our end.

On the web server nodes where chat runs, I changed directory into the logs directory. Now that I looked in SocketServer logs for a web node running chat, I noticed some lines had “user” in them. I guessed the value after user was the id in the person table for the user who experienced the error. It was easy enough to look for that id in the database and confirm my guess.

This first grep of SocketServer log isolates the sixth item between colons teases which is that person id. The second grep reports the whole line including the time stamp.

grep “[0-9]-user” SocketServer.??????????.log | awk -F\: ‘{print $6}’ | sort | uniq
grep “[0-9]-user” SocketServer.??????????.log

With the results of the first grep just above, replace the numbers in bold with a comma delimited list.In the database I looked for these ids with this SQL. Substitute your own id numbers in bold. They turned out to be the id numbers for users experiencing the problems. I recognized the accounts as people who had been testing.

select lc.name, p.webct_id, p.id from person p, learning_context lc

where p.learning_context_id = lc.id and p.id in (99999,999999)

order by lc.name, p.webct_id

/

It looked like in production still had some of the same errors. The one session I profiled appeared to show the errors in chat start about 2 hours after the last action by the user in the webserver.log. This is the time the TCP profile cuts off the chat.

The cause of these more frequently on development in chat turned out to chat having a 5 minute profile instead of the correct 2 hour one. Now everything is consistently having this problem when users let their sessions expire.

Hopefully they are just leaving their windows open on personal computers and not public spaces.

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1. “[Blackboard is] a one-stop shop where students can come and get absolutely any access to me, any access to the teaching assistants.” — Philip Wirtz
2. “[Open source] classroom management systems [like Sakai and Moodle] are becoming increasingly popular because they allow schools to adapt the software to meet their needs.”
3. “Even though Blackboard continues to grow through acquisitions, Klopfer says the company could face competition from Google in the collegiate market.”

It would have been good to have more points of view such as from schools using open source products. At least they were not completely ignored.

The Google angle seems more of a stretch. There is no reason why the existing Google Apps for Education or other similar cloud tools could not not be used for the purpose of interacting with students. Reasons for why not to do so depend on distrust of the cloud.

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About 9270 of the 9613 in the yet to be rolled logs for BEA-101017 all had to do with “Invalid resource properties – specify path or object id but not both-https://site.view.usg.edu/webct/RelativeResourceManager”. Suspected these exception errors should show in the web server log with the 500 HTTP code for “Server Error”. A simple way to identify them:

grep RelativeResourceManager webserver.log | grep -w 500

Armed with the content=9999999999 value, I used grep to locate which web pages called this URL.

grep -B 10 9999999999 webserver.log | head -50

This pointed me to looking in the HTML for custom web pages. I found CSS using the offending URL as a repeating background for the headers on a navigation bar. There is a blue background color. This image displays a vertical gradient for the same blue. Essentially a fancier version which no one noticed has not worked in the past 7 months. The failure isn’t because of the CSS. This just tells the browser to call the image so if putting the URL in the address bar doesn’t work then I wouldn’t expect the browser to call it from the HTML.

What makes this worse is the image file exists in System Files where it ought to reside for this to work. Also, the URL used appears to make a difference in this case but not others. Other images used on the page work and reside in the same folder in Vista as the failing URL.

Fails: https://site.view.usg.edu/webct/RelativeResourceManager?content=99999999999
Works: https://site.view.usg.edu/webct/urw/lc999999.tp999/RelativeResourceManager?contentID=99999999999

Even worse? Both fail on the test cluster using the content id for that file in that system.

SOLVED:

Overlooked the bad variable “content=”. It should be “contentID=”. Vista doesn’t respond with something like, Content is not a valid variable for the RelativeResourceManager.

P.S. I like grep’s -w flag as it requires spaces around the word. When looking for a number in a web server log, there is a big difference between 500 and 2132500232234. Both would show up for just “grep 500″.

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[File] cannot be saved because its name contains illegal characters

The file name follows this pattern: abcde”fg hijkm”.pdf

Removing the double quotes ought to sort out that issue. Simple. We’ve known for a long time CE/Vista doesn’t handle certain special characters very well. You know, remove data from fields which would cause an error before attempting to save it. Or even alert the user why something failed. “Sorry this file cannot be uploaded. Check this list for likely reasons.”

The client provided in the ticket this upsetting approach from research she found online.

Being that you are on a cluster, there is potential that it’s the load balancer, could be it’s not handling sessions properly and tossing sessions back and forth between nodes. — Blackboard Support File Management and Issues – Blackboard Vista Student Troubleshooting

I’m glad this one was something far more simple.

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Both think the problem must be the other’s fault. Because you know… Their product is perfect. They never have design issues. Ever. So it must be someone else’s fault.

Problem 1:

Upon loading the zip package into the CE/Vista SCORM module, the end user saw:

The SCORM package is not compliant with SCORM Ver 1.2 Conformance Requirements. All supporting schemas must be at the root of the package; the following schemas were not found at the root: [adlcp_rootv1p2.xsd, imscp_rootv1p1p2.xsd, imsmd_rootv1p2p1.xsd] As a result, the package may not perform as desired. Are you sure you want to continue?

I actually feel bad for not immediately recognizing this meant these XSD files needed to be in the zip file.  Blackboard ought to feel bad for having the response this means the imsmanifest.xml in the file was written for a more current version of SCORM than the rather ancient 1.2. I could understand that response if specific items in the file are only relevant in the current version. I don’t understand that response when the same file which works with Vista 3 (created about the same time as SCORM 1.2) works and Vista 8 doesn’t. Sounds more like something changed in Vista 8 to make it more strict.

Fixing the missing XSDs files resulted in a new error:

The SCORM package could not be imported because it does not comply with one or more specifications within the package. The following error was produced: **Parsing Error** Line: 7 Message: cvc-complex-type.2.4.c: The matching wildcard is strict, but no declaration can be found for element ‘lom’. Please inform the SCORM vendor and try again once the problem has been resolved.

Is it wrong to be excited about an error? Dropping the problematic items from the imsmanifest.xml file produces new errors. After five iterations, I don’t seem to be making much progress.

Problem 2:

This SCORM module simply passes to an HTML file with JavaScript some variables to send the user off to the QuestionMark site. It should not this big of a deal.

Somehow Vista 8 is calling the file where it doesn’t exist for the QuestionMark SCORM module but not other modules.

QuestionMark addres:

/webct/scorm/viewer/perceptionSCO.htm?call=scorm&
session=9999999999999999&
href=https://ondemand.questionmark.com/delivery/session.php&
lang=-&customerid=mcg

Known good SCORM module address:

/webct/RelativeResourceManager/999999999999/filename.html

The number after RelativeResourceManager typically can be found under “View File Information” in the file manager. The file name after the number is the name of a file in the zip. Copying the address for the known good let me view it. At this point it seemed logical I could just build the address to the QuestionMark zip manually and see it as a designer (maybe not as a student). Unfortunately, this gives me system exception errors.

Last Solutions:

In trying to solve two problems with one stone, I took the imsmanifest.xml for the known good SCORM module and just changed the href= for resource and file to use the perceptionSCO.html file name for QuestionMark. Still failed to find the file.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT…

I removed all the variables after the perceptionSCO.htm. Now Vista finds the file. It gives me errors about not having the values in those variables, but it found it.

This is stupid.

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The possibilities are:

1. Browser: Use a different one which doesn’t complain.
2. Settings: When it comes to security settings, I’m hesitant to recommend thousands of users change them without being extremely sure doing so is safe. Seems to me having it ignore the issue exposes users to danger. Rumor is also Windows Updates can revert the settings back to defaults.
3. Content: Change how the content is delivered to avoid the issue.

The content is being put inside HTML files rather than using the Web Link tool to open a new window with the video. Even using a Web Link tool to show the content inside the same window causes the IE complaint.

All three will cause a ton of work to address the issues. In my opinion wrangling designers ought to require the least amount of work of the three. Though I guess that would depend on the popularity of IE and neediness of the users.

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Say what? We had over 22,000 active sections last term? We have 40 institutions and dozens of professional designers and thousands of faculty designing their own classes. Cryptic emails about being frustrated with Vista means I have to contact the sender, find out what institution, class, problem happened and send that to an institution person who has to figure out which designer to direct it. I’m too far removed to be useful for these requests.

Solutions:

1. CE/Vista ought to keep a broken link report. It would record to a log in the Designer Tools reporting which addresses resulted in errors and a list of the referrers, how many times requests came from each referrer. This gives designers something they can use to address the problems. Maybe give the designers the ability to reset the log on a page when they think they have fixed it. Give them an icon in the class list to see when there are unhandled cases.
2. Assuming the above is too hard, this mailto link should be a form recording the learning context involved, referring page, browser, user, and file which failed the request. The message could go to the mail tool for the designers.

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Mitigated speech gets a lot of use by people trying not to offend. All too often, people who have been hurt because of mitigated speech question what isn’t being told as though the omission or gaps are intentionally deceptive.

What are or are not supported browsers came up again. The trick here is the mitigated speech used with the levels of support. I assume the intent is clarity.

• Certified – supported with complete testing done.
• Compatible – supported with some testing done.
• Provisional – supported with some testing done before official release.

Certified is taken as supported by all parties. Compatible and Provisional are interpreted as not supported because the complete testing has yet to be done. I think Blackboard’s intent was to mark them as supported but qualify how customers might encounter issues due to not fully testing. This means Blackboard is interested in learning about the problems encountered in order to address them.

At least that is my interpolation. Mmmmmm the Kool-Aid is good.

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siapi output says:

error invoking method in adapter, message is: cvc-complex-type.2.3: Element ‘extension’ cannot have character [children], because the type’s content type is element-only.

Means the wrong type between luminis and ims was used. I created a files.properties file which sets the import type based on the name of the file. For the luminis type, the persons records are in persons1.xml. For the ims type, the persons records are in ims_users1.xml.

Message is : Authorization denied

User trying to import the file must be an institution administrator. I probably created the import user but did not enroll it as an admin. What I get for moving too fast.

error invoking method in adapter, message is: Deployable component is not enabled

This one is actually accurate. The Luminis Message Broker settings need to be changed so Enabled equals true. Probably the other settings are also back to defaults. This happens after most Service Pack upgrades.

The learning context represented by the lc_id and lc_source parameters is not within or equal to the learning context represented by the glcid parameter. This may cause problems if the learning contexts in the XML do not specify a parent or cannot be imported directly under the instituion

The XML file only contained 1 person and 1 member record. So this must be about the sourcedid.source and sourcedid.id of that file. The student was enrolled in the section, so I guess maybe the error can be ignored?

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This means we frequently get oddities in the files which cause problems. Thankfully I am not the person who has to verify these files are good. I just get to answer the questions that person has about why a particular file failed to load.

The CE/Vista import process will stop if its validator finds invalid XML. Unfortunately, the error “An exception occurred while obtaining error messages.  See webct.log” doesn’t sound like invalid XML.

Usage is pretty simple:

xmllint –valid /path/to/file.xml | head

1. If the file is valid, then the whole file is in the output.
2. If there are warnings, then they precede the whole file.
3. If there are errors, then only the errors are displayed.

I use head here because our files can be up to 15MB, so this prevents the whole file from going on the screen for the first two situations.

I discovered this in researching how to handle the first situation below. It came up again today. So this has been useful to catch errors in the client supplied files where the file failed to load.

1: parser error : XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
 <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

162: parser error : EntityRef: expecting ‘;’
<long>College of Engineering &amp&#059; CIS</long>

(Bolded the errors.) The number before the colon is the line number. The carat it uses to indicate where on the line an error occurred isn’t accurate, so I ignore it.

My hope is to get this integrated into our processes to validate these files before they are loaded and save ourselves headaches the next morning.

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The first time this came up, Blackboard support wanted us to overhaul the session management. BIG-IP documents saying attempting this new method was a horrible idea caused us never to get on board. We agreed to conduct dupe.pl tests which showed there wasn’t a problem with session spray, which the solution was designed to resolve. Stonewalled, we closed the ticket when the institution reporting it didn’t have any cases to provide us.

So our client with the issue asked us to resume work on it. The key information they provided me was their users hit the /webct/logonDisplay.dowebct. Since they use Single-Sign On (SSO) from a portal, no users should ever hit this page. From investigating these cases, I was able to find a number of cases of users hitting /webct/displayAssessment.dowebct or /webct/displayAssessmentIntro.dowebct with the guest user.

See, the guest user exists at the domain learning context. Users appear as guest before they login or as the logout. They should not appear as guest when taking a quiz.

So I provided this information to Blackboard with the web server logs. They wanted more cases, so I provided more. More clients reported the issue, so I had plenty of sources. Plus it pointed to this problem affecting at least 4 if not all clusters.

Next, our TSM left, so we were provide a new person unused to us. It took just the first note to make a huge mistake. “Provide us all the logs from all the nodes.” At 5GB of logs times 14 nodes in a cluster, 70GB of information for an event which took up maybe 10KB seems like overkill. So… No. I like to think of my self as proficient at system administration, which means I can gather whatever logs you desire.

Now we come to the second mistake. Please refrain from asking me questions already explained in the ticket. Sure, the ticket has a large amount of information. However, if I can remember what is in the ticket, then so can the people working it.

Unfortunately I had to answer a question about replicating this with: it was based on my log trolling not actual cases of students complaining. My mistake was not going to the clients to find a description of the problem. Therefore, Blackboard wanted a WebEx so I could explain the same one sentence repetitively. *headesk* We agreed on me getting a case where a user could explain the problem.

As luck would have it, I got just a case a few days later. So I captured the web server log information and sent it along with the user description. My laziness resulted in me not trimming the log set down to the period of the error. Therefore, this log set showed a user1 login, user2 login, then user1 login again. Blackboard responded this might be a case of sporadic shifting users. Hello! I guess these folks are not used to seeing the SSO login to be able to know the session shifted to another user because… it… logged… in?

By pulling the entries from the f5 log showing the client IP address, Blackboard now wants us to implement a configuration change to the f5 to reflect the browser’s IP in our web server log. Getting such a change isn’t easy for us. Don’t say this is the only way to get client IPs when I… have… sent… you… client IPs. We’ve been at this impasse for 3 weeks. So I get to have another WebEx where I explain the same thing I’ve already written. *headesk*

Maybe it is finally time to ask the people if they are at all familiar with the known issue which sounds like the issue?

VST-3898: When taking an assessment the session is not kept alive. The student’s session times out forcing the student to restart the assessment or makes them unable to complete the assessment.

We plan to implement the upgrade which resolves this issue next week. So, I am hoping this does resolve it. Also, I am tempted to just close this ticket. Should the institutions find they are still having problems in January when the students have had a few quizzes fail, then I might have forgotten how utterly completely useless Blackboard has been on this issue.

All I ask is:

1. Know the information in the ticket so I don’t have to copy and paste from the same ticket.
2. Don’t ask for all the logs. Tell me what logs you want to view.
3. Don’t tell me something is the only way when I’ve already shown you another way. I’m not an idiot.
4. Don’t ask me if the f5 log has the cookie when the entries I’ve already sent you don’t have it.

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Tip: Keep a ‘last known good’ config.xml file on your admin node.
Your Bb Vista cluster config.xml file | laura gekeler

Very good tip! We learned this lesson a couple months into hosting Vista 8 in pre-production.

She goes on to explain this file gets overwritten any time a change in Weblogic is made. Sometimes these changes are (un)intentionally made by an administrator using the console. Sometimes Weblogic detects problematic conditions and makes the change itself. When these changes create problematic conditions, then the last known good version saved us from having to go make the changes ourselves and potentially miss something.

In our cases of problems, a single node failing to shutdown after the JMS node was shutdown caused Weblogic to rewrite who should be the JMS node. It also caused a jumbling of the user preferred server stanzas. We now monitor for these problems and page ourselves to warn us about the problem so we can address it immediately rather than let our clients discover the problem a few days later. (I also somewhat mentioned this in the Forcing Weblogic’s Config.xml post.)

The times I’ve done this I didn’t go as far as Laura. I just…

1. Stop all the nodes in the cluster.
2. Copy the current version from $WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN/config/config.xml to /home/<user>.
3. Copy the last known version from /pathto/lastknownversion/config.xml to $WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN/config/.
4. Use “touch $WEBLOGIC_DOMAIN/REFRESH” on each managed node.

I am now curious about why she wanted new server directories or a new Vista_WLSstore database table?

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In my opinion this situation arises because Microsoft makes it difficult to notice a shortcut file isn’t the actual file on Windows.

1. By default Windows XP and Vista (anyone know about Win 7?) have “Hide extensions for known file types” checked. So a student is unlikely to notice a shortcut has .lnk instead of .docx by looking at the file name. I think this situation was created to solve the issue of users renaming files to the wrong extension arbitrarily. Windows depends on the file extension for much software.
2. Most file icons have a set appearance. Shortcut icons look like the target file only with a small white box with an arrow. Most users are likely to miss this distinction in my opinion.

Our recommendation to students is to remove the setting mentioned in #1. This ought to better help students figure out which file they are going to submit. Let’s hope, anyway.

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Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic config.xml to record user agents to the webserver.log.

One trick I use is the double quotes in awk to identify just the user agent. This information is then sorting by name to count (uniq -c) how many of each is present. Finally, I sort again by number with the largest at the top to see which are the most common.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

This is what I will use looking for a specific user. If I am looking at a wider range, such as the user age for hits on a page, then I probably will use the head command to look at the top 20.

A “feature” of this is getting the build (Firefox 3.011) rather than just the version (Firefox 3). For getting the version, I tend to use something more like this to count the found version out of the log.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | grep -c ‘<version>’

I have yet to see many CE/Vista URIs with the names of web browsers. So these are the most common versions one would likely find (what to grep – name – notes):

1. MSIE # – Microsoft Internet Explorer – I’ve seen 5 through 8 in the last few months.
2. Firefox # – Mozilla Firefox – I’ve seen 2 through 3.5. There is enough difference between 3 and 3.5 (also 2 and 2.5) I would count them separately.
3. Safari – Apple/WebKit – In searching for this one, I would add to the search a ‘grep -v Chrome’ or to eliminate Google Chrome user agents.
4. Chrome # – Google Chrome – Only versions 1 and 2.

Naturally there many, many others. It surprised me to see iPhone and Android on the list.

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