Webalizer Statistics stopped working after Debian upgrade

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on May 7th 2012 - Listed in Internet Linux

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Just experienced a 'funny' issue on a recently upgraded Debian server (upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze): The Webalizer statistics were not created anymore.

On web servers with Confixx installed, the script which creates the Webalizer statistics is located in /root/confixx/runwebalizer.sh. After a manual launch, the following errors were shown:

~/confixx # ./runwebalizer.sh
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat
Error Opening file /usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat

After a quick research I found the following hint in Debian Bug #532123:

This file is now part of the geoip-database package, which webalizer should depend on.

So even if you have libgeoip1 installed (and this was sufficient on Debian Lenny), you now need to install geoip-database as well:

# apt-get install geoip-database

Shortly after that, Webalizer ran fine again.

Update May 11th 2012:
The issue went deeper than I previously thought. Although the errors of the GeoIP.dat file disappeared, the Webalizer statistics weren't updated automatically anymore. Only a manual launch of the mentioned runwebalizer.sh script worked.

So I tried to run the basic Webalizer command with the configuration file of a Confixx user:

# /usr/bin/webalizer -c /var/www/web24/.configs/webalizer.conf -d

Nothing.. There was no output at all (even with the debug parameter). A quick check at the statistics showed: No update was made. So something still doesn't seem to work. After doing some research, I came across a Swiss webpage mentioning problems with automatic updates of Webalizer statistics. There they blame the history files (webalizer.current and webalizer.hist) which are found in each user's Webalizer folder. It doesn't hurt to try and I deleted the file webalizer.current and relaunched the same command as before:

# /usr/bin/webalizer -c /var/www/web24/.configs/webalizer.conf -d
--> unresolved country for '199.19.249.196' (GeoIP says (null):(null))
--> unresolved country for '107.21.154.144' (GeoIP says (null):(null))

Ha! That looks different!!! And the statistics are now shown updated.

Update May 22nd 2012:
Actually the script which is used by Confixx is /root/confixx/httpdtraffik.sh. And this one should be launched every night, but nothing happened. Even when launching it manually, nothing happened. The source of the problem is that squeeze creates a symlink of /bin/sh to /bin/dash. In previous Debian versions this was always a symlink to /bin/bash. The httpdtraffik.sh script uses /bin/sh as Shell-interpreter and as this points to /bin/dash, the script didn't work anymore and didn't create the statistics anymore.

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