alscan

An Access log scanner

The 0.5 version is a re-write.

The old callback ridden JavaScript version has been redone using an async/await style. The new version uses TypeScript. In fact, it is designed to be executed directly by Node (v22.18 and later) directly, rather than being compiled first.

Several of the old (problematic) libraries have been removed. This makes the dependabot quiet.

The hopelessly out-of-date user agent database has been removed. This makes some existing options less than useful. Not much use in sorting results based upon the user agent source, when they are all Unknown.

How the time of a reboot is determined has changed. The prior version scanned the wtmp file. This is a binary format file that varied between linux and MacOS. The libraries necessary to read and parse the file have security issues that do not look to be resolved quickly. So, I modified the code to read from the file /proc/uptime. This file can be parsed easily. However, it only exists on linux systems. On other systems, the reboot time remains undefined. This limits functionality, but removes the security issues.

Summary

The alscan tool is used to extract data from web server access logs. It creates a report based upon the contents of the logs and the options specified on the command-line.

More information about the tool is available at its home page.

The tool is released under the Apache 2.0 License.

It is compatible with the Apache web server's combined and the common log formats.

The software is designed for Linux and other Unix-like systems.