Re: Accurate user-based log file analysis

Jon Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk)
Tue, 18 Jul 1995 20:44:35 +0100 (BST)


On Tue, 18 Jul 1995, Terry Myerson wrote:
> 30% are academic - The location of these users can be determined.

Quack - thanks for playing. Academic users (in the UK at least) are
getting heavily on the proxy cache bandwagon. Take hensa.ac.uk (or even
our lowly wwwcache.lut.ac.uk) for example; that appears as one host but
hides hundreds, if not thousands of users. How are you going to know that
an access from hensa.ac.uk is really me from weeble.lut.ac.uk? We're
over a hundred miles apart (ok, chicken feed in American terms maybe but
that's a big distance in the UK). Think of universities as fairly hefty
companies - after all they are - and see your third entry.

Lastly; pop quiz. Where is dmu.ac.uk? Where is open.ac.uk?

> 30% are from small businesses - The location of these users can be determined

Er, how are you going to determine the location of lots small businesses
who have CompuServe accounts? They sure don't all physically exist
anywhere near the CompuServe site. Also small businesses have a habit of
even sharing one account amongst all their employees so you could be
seeing different people appearing as the same user.

> 20% are from large businesses - The location of these users can't be assured

Agree (at last :-) ).

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Department of Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
*** Nothing looks so like a man of sense as a fool who holds his tongue ***