Version 3.0 User's Guide
Logs	Previous | Next Contents

NetCloak can maintain a log in addition to the one created by your Web server. Information included in the basic log is date and time of the request, status, the user's IP address or domain, the file requested, and the size of the response. The NetCloak extended log adds the username, password, referrer, and browser type. This extra information is added at the end of each line, so it should not interfere with log analyzing programs that expect only basic information.

Figure 8: The Logs tab of the NetCloak Configuration window.

Figure 9: The Logs page of the NetCloak Web admin interface.

One advantage to using the NetCloak log is that it will log only your HTML pages. When a client requests a page with multiple images on it, your Web server log will contain several entries, one for the HTML page and another for each of the images linked into the page. This redundancy is often unneeded, and causes your log files to quickly become very large. In addition, the Web server incurs the overhead associated with logging each page served multiple times.

By shutting off your Web server log, server performance will improve and your logs will be more manageable. The NetCloak log can then be used to show you who has visited your site and when. Of course, NetCloak will only log those file requests that it processes, so be aware that some site access will not be logged at all. This may not be appropriate for all Web sites, but for those whose logging requirements aren't as strict it is an excellent way to improve performance and simplify site management.

To set logging preferences, choose the "Logs" tab of the Configuration window.

You can choose whether to maintain a standard log, an extended log, or skip logging entirely. You can also choose to store the log information anywhere on your hard drive by clicking the "Log File" button and selecting a file to keep the log.

When strange problems occur, you can "Enable Debug Logging" in NetCloak. This causes NetCloak to create a file named "NetCloak Debug Log" located in the "NetCloak Files" folder, which contains very detailed debugging information about NetCloak processing. This information is mostly useful to engineers here at Maxum when debugging software problems, so you should ordinarily leave this option disabled unless instructed to enable it by Maxum tech support personnel.

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