Gemini server logging formats and practices

[solderpunk]

On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 05:21:01AM -0400, Sean Conner wrote:
 
>   But there's really not much to log, other than remote address, request,
> status, and potentially the issuer/subject of any given certificate (and
> even that might be optional).  

I agree, there's not much to log, far less than HTTP.  But there's some
real utility in having, err, utilities which can parse a log and
generate basic statistics an admin might like to know: most popular
resources, frequent requests resulting in 51 Not Found responses,
average requests per day.  And people are more likely to write things
like this if there's one format to worry about and not one per server.

This isn't a hard side-project by any means.  Something very simple and
easy to read into existing data processing tools, like a comma separated
or tab separated value file with standardised names and/or order for the
columns and an agreed-upon representation of time would do the trick.

I am understanding of and sympathetic towards both admins who want to
log IPs for debugging or abuse-detection purposes and towards those who
don't want to so they can (rightfully) boast about their severs' respect
for privacy.  So the standard format should include a column for remote
IP and also have a clearly defined behaviour for anonymised logs which
log analysers can recognise and handle gracefully (as simple as
specifying a standard character, like "-", to be placed in that column).
We could also define a half-way format, where a compact hash of the IP is
logged, so that unique visitor statistics can be calcualted for those
who want them, or e.g. malfunctioning bots can be spotted, but nothing.

Cheers,
Solderpunk