Apache Module mod_log_forensic

is no longer required since version 2.1This module provides for forensic logging of client requests. Logging is done before and after processing a request, so the forensic log contains two log lines for each request. The forensic logger is very strict, which means:

script, which can be found in the distribution's support directory, may be helpful in evaluating the forensic log output.

In order to identify each request, a unique request ID is assigned. This forensic ID can be cross logged in the normal transfer log using the %{forensic-id}n

format string. If you're using

, its generated ID will be used.moduniqueid

The first line logs the forensic ID, the request line and all received headers, separated by pipe characters (|

). A sample line looks like the following (all on one line):

+yQtJf8CoAB4AAFNXBIEAAAAA|GET /manual/de/images/down.gif HTTP/1.1|Host:localhost%3a8080|User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv%3a1.6) Gecko/20040216 Firefox/0.8|Accept:image/png,

The plus character at the beginning indicates that this is the first log line of this request. The second line just contains a minus character and the ID again:

script takes as its argument the name of the logfile. It looks for those +

ID pairs and complains if a request was not completed.

The log files may contain sensitive data such as the contents of Authorization:

headers (which can contain passwords), so they should not be readable by anyone except the user that starts the server.

The argument, which specifies the location to which the logs will be written, can take one of the following two types of values:

", followed by the path to a program to receive the log information on its standard input. The program name can be specified relative to the ServerRoot

. This will be root if the server was started by root; be sure that the program is secure or switches to a less privileged user.httpd

When entering a file path on non-Unix platforms, care should be taken to make sure that only forward slashes are used even though the platform may allow the use of back slashes. In general it is a good idea to always use forward slashes throughout the configuration files.

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Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4