shrubbery.forest.net, the server that processes stats for the older Mac servers and the Windows servers, will be going down later today for an OS upgrade. It will likely be Tuesday or Wednesday before it is fully operational again. We will update the support blog when the work is complete.

Our stats system is still undergoing modification, as mentioned several days ago. We are now testing the new scripts on one of our UNIX servers, souari.forest.net. Souari users should be able to see their stats at:

http://souari.forest.net/stats/username/

...where "username" is, of course, replaced with their own username. As a side benefit, you will also find a file in your home directory named "webalizer.conf.sample". If you edit this file and upload a new copy named "webalizer.conf," our stats system will use your config file while generating your stats. Note that while we permit this, we don't support it; it's available to you if you want to decipher the webalizer config file, but we won't provide tech support to help you with that. However, it's pretty well documented in comments inside the file.

Souari's stats are being built now to October 3, and we'll be doing one-and-two day runs while testing the new system. When we're satisfied that it's working properly, we'll set it to run automatically on a nightly basis.

Those of you on other servers won't see any changes yet, though we are performing a run now to bring them up to mid-October. When souari's stats are working properly, we'll start moving the other UNIX and Mac OS X servers over to the new method of processing stats, starting with Banana.

Until now, all digital.forest statistics have been processed on a single centralized server, largely due to limitations inherent in the WebSTAR 3 and 4 servers that, for years, made up the bulk of our web hosting platforms. However, while this has made it possible to run stats for these servers, it has also resulted in gradually increasing delays in our stats processing for all servers.

To address this situation, we are now in the process of migrating stats processing for our UNIX and Mac OS X servers off the central stats server and onto the hosting servers themselves. This will permit those servers that can be relied upon to roll their own logs and process stats on an automated schedule to do so, reducing the load on the centralized stats server (thus making for more timely stats for the servers that still need it), and providing nightly stats processing for the UNIX and OS X servers.

In the meantime, stats processing will be on hold until the migration is complete. Once this change is finished (which will take 1-2 weeks), we will begin catching up. Individual UNIX and OS X servers may begin processing their own stats earlier than that.

We will post updates here to keep you informed of our progress.

All server stats have now been caught up through January 31, 2004. We began the run for February, 2004 this morning; it will probably take about a week to complete. We will then begin our final catch-up run for the beginning of March.

As of this morning, all UNIX and Mac OS X machines should be caught up through January 2004, and all Mac OS WebSTAR machines should be caught up through December 2003. We have just started to run January 2004 stats for the Mac OS WebSTAR machines.

When those are complete -- which should be some time next week -- we will begin running February stats for all servers together.

We have completed re-running stats for the UNIX servers from November 2003 through January 2004. We are now recovering stats for the Mac WebSTAR servers from March 2003 through December 2003. This should be a considerably faster process, as we don't need to re-resolve the logs; tomorrow afternoon, we should have a rough idea of how long it will take.

When this is complete, we will re-run the WebSTAR logs for January 2004. We will then begin running February stats for all servers.

The recovery of statistics data on stats.forest.net is continuing. The UNIX servers completed re-running the December stats this weekend, completing the reconstruction of their November/December 2003 data. We began running their January stats this morning; they should be completed by mid-week.

At that point, we will begin the process of rebuilding the last 12 months of stats for the Mac OS 9 WebSTAR servers; we will run these servers in alphabetical order.

The stats server is up and running again, and we have begun the process of rebuilding stats. We are starting with the UNIX and Mac OS X servers, for which we maintain a backlog of about three months of logs; we will be able to rebuild stats for most of these servers from November 7, 2003 to present.

When we have caught those servers up to January 31, 2004, we will begin rebuilding stats for the Mac OS 9 WebSTAR servers. Because the hits for all users on these servers are stored in centralized server logs, rather than many individual logs, we are able to preserve twelve months worth of logs for these servers. We will start with February 1, 2003 and catch these servers up to January 31, 2004. We will then resume stats processing on all servers from February 1, 2004.

This will be a lengthy process. We expect to have the UNIX servers caught up to January 31, 2004 toward the end of next week, at which point we will begin rebuilding stats for the WebSTAR servers.

We have discovered a problem with one of the hard drives on the stats server, and we are rebuilding it presently. It may take a few days before stats are accessible. We will keep you updated here. Thanks for your patience.

Site statistics have been delayed due to a problem with the statistics for butternut.forest.net; we need to rebuild all 2002 statistics for Butternut, which will take a few days. We will then continue the stats run for all other servers, which should currently be up to Dec. 22. We apologize for the delay.

Infoasis used a stats solution built specifically to work with their server configuration. This configuration is dramatically different from any other server we are running here at digital.forest, and it isn't really possible for us to wrangle it into a shape that will fit with our stats system. Therefore, we are offering to move any customers who want site statistics from the www.infoasis.com server to our butternut.forest.net server free of charge.

Simply notify us if you want to make the move. We will create a new account for you on our server and notify you of the login information; you can then upload your files and test the site. When you are satisfied that it works as expected, you'll let us know and we will point the DNS to the new server and shut off your account on the old one.

Note that this solution may not work for a few sites &151; namely, any that use MySQL or PHP. If you have such a site, please contact us and an account representative will discuss your options with you.
Please let us know if you have any questions.