Some tools for using AWStats in accordance with EU privacy laws

shuffle_last_octet.pl

What it does

shuffle_last_octet.pl is a Unix filter (a command-line program which reads from the standard input stream and writes to the standard output stream) which expects IP addresses in dotted quad notation in the first column of the data stream. It shuffles the rightmost quad consistently so that web log analyzsers such as AWStats can still generate meaningful statistics although the real IP address of visitors is not disclosed.

Customizing

Some IP addresses should not be altered, e.g. 127.0.0.1 for localhost. You must enter these IP addresses (or entire subnets in CIDR notation) directy as arguments to __MATCH_IP. No placesholders (whether variables, constants or other function calls) are allowed there. This is a limitation of the Perl module Net::IP::Match. On the upside, it is damn fast.

How to use it

This script implements a filter, i.e. it reads from STDIN and writes to STDOUT. As usual on unixoid systems.

If you use AWStats, use the following line in your awstats-www.conf (or whatever your AWStats configuration file is called):

LogFile="cat /var/log/apache2/access.log | /usr/local/bin/shuffle_last_octet.pl |"

Preferably though, you use this script to anonymize IP addresses even before your web server writes them to disk:

Apache allows you to filter logging data like this:

CustomLog "| /usr/local/bin/shuffle_last_octet.pl > /var/log/apache2/access.log" common

When using other web server software, you can create a named pipe using mkfifo and log to that special file (analogous to the log rotation solution described here). The same approach should work with caching servers such as Varnish.

Limitations

This script handles IPv4 addresses only. Patches for IPv6 most welcome.

zero_last_octet.pl

Do not use this if you want to use the processed data in AWStats or any other log analyzer. zero_last_octet.pl is the older brother of shuffle_last_octet.pl. Really just a sed one-liner, it zeros the last octet of all IPv4 addresses. This will skew your statistics. You have been warned.

anycat

anycat is example code taken from IO::Uncompress::AnyUncompress which was written by Paul Marquess, pmqs at cpan.org.

It is a generalization for cat, zcat, bzcat, lzcat, and xzcat, so it can read all the compressed files you might find on a server. I include it here because it is not contained in all distributions of IO::Uncompress::AnyUncompress, and I need it in many AWStats configurations, namely when I have a web server that switched compression methods during its lifetime. In these cases, I put a line like the following into awstats-www.conf (or whatever your AWStats configuration file is called):

  LogFile="/usr/local/bin/anycat /var/log/apache2/access.log-%YYYY-0%MM-0%DD-0* | /usr/local/bin/shuffle_last_octet.pl |"