Apache on cPanel weirdness: "combined combined combined."

[reddragdiva]

If you have this problem, where you can't get anything out of awstats and it turns out to be because your Apache logs contain nothing but the word "combined", once per line, over and over — this is because cPanel b0rked your httpd.conf and left out the LogFormat lines. Apache then presumes the word "combined" at the end of the CustomLog line is not a direction on how to log, but the actual log format. Cut'n'paste them from httpd.conf.orig and somehow beat cPanel into putting them into its RCS.

(cPanel is source-available proprietary software to make LAMP stupid. Our host is at the stage where I'm very glad I have years of expertise beating Apache around, and sudo.)

Comments

[reddragdiva]

mod_macro - it's ace. I found it last month, we're using it on live and it's made our lives so much easier already.

(The author is absolutely determined it will not become Turing-complete - it does only very stupid substitution. He says if you want anything fancier, use Perl and abandon all hope.)

We have a pile of stuff like this in our apache/conf/ directories:

vhost-default.conf (relevant section, at end):

...
<Macro FOO_LOCAL_CUSTOM_LOG $APPLICATION $DOMAIN>
CustomLog "|/usr/local/apache/bin/rotatelogs /data/apache/$APPLICATION/logs/$DOMAIN_server0000123.server.not_access_log.%Y-%m-%d 86400" withcookies
</Macro>

<Macro FOO_SERVER_ALIAS_FARNARKLE>
ServerAlias farnarkle-04.host.example.com
</Macro>
Include conf/vhost-farnarkle.conf
...

httpd.conf (load the module, define the macro, use the macro)

 ...
LoadModule macro_module       modules/mod_macro.so
 ...
Include conf/vhost-default.conf
 ...
Include conf/vhost-farnarkle.conf
 ...

vhost-farnarkle.conf:

 ...
Use FOO_SERVER_ALIAS_FARNARKLE
 ...
Use FOO_LOCAL_CUSTOM_LOG farnarkle www.foofarnarkle.cam
 ...

[vampwillow]

When you first mentioned macro I took a look at it but found it wouldn't co-exist with something or other (will have to check again what the issue was) so I couldn't use it.

[reddragdiva]

Do let me know. It's about as simple as a module gets (it's one 30KB C file, you can even review the code yourself!), so I'm interested to know.

We're using 1.1.6 because our Apaches are all 2.0-series - the current 1.10 is for Apache 2.2.

[vampwillow]

found it. the module requires apxs to compile and install. To use apxs your apache must support DSO httpd binary has to be built with the mod_so module, which mine isn't (Ubuntu variant) so I couldn't use the apxs which meant I couldn't install it.

[reddragdiva]

So why don't you use loadable modules?

[vampwillow]

seems not. Default ubuntu server install doesn't use them in the same way. I've found [http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1145086 this] though which talks about compiling apache from source to do so. Not sure it is best way to go though.

[reddragdiva]

Should be fine. It does compile pretty cleanly on Linux, after all ...

(if it's 2.x series. Compiling 1.3 from source is TEH HORROR TEH HO̵R҉R͏O͘R͜ ̶ ̵T̀͝E̡͜҉H̵̢ H̡͘Ó͘R̷̛҉R͏̨O̶̷̸R̢͢ ̸TE͝H ̡͘͡H̡Ó͡R̡̧̀R̕O̕Ŗ