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Plesk Awstat forgets the monthly statistics
July 8th, 2008Plesk 8.3 awstats only shows the current month’s log statistics. The monthly history from previous months is forgotten.
Cause:
Awstat’s configuration files all point to a working directory of $DOMAIN_STATS/webstat/current. There is a daily job which calculates the web activity and places the results into that directory. The “current” directory is actually a symbolic link to a real directory called $DOMAIN_STATS/webstat/YYYY-MM, where YYYY-MM is year-month.
On the 1st day of the month another program creates a fresh folder called YYYY-MM and makes the “current” link point to this instead. This new directory is empty and so the “current” directory has no history in which to draw last months statistics.
The rotation program runs at about 4am, which means that activity from 0:00 to 4:00 are trapped in the previous months activity folder.
Solution:
After creating the new month folder, the Plesk program should copy the previous months activity files into the new folder.
This problem is known to Plesk but their 8.4 release was a bit of a disaster and had to be withdrawn, but as I understand this issue is not fixed in 8.4 either.
One of the nice things about Plesk is that all its system maintenance scripts are written in PHP instead of the local shell. This is almost certainly because it can use the same scripts on Unix and Windows, so it removes the need to write batch files in bash and MS-DOS.
The problem with Plesk is that it obfuscates the PHP files preventing them from being read in the same way as a normal (text) PHP file. This makes it especially hard to navigate through the Plesk system maintenance files.
As a result of this, there is a maze of unreadable cron (and anacron) configuration files hiding the Plesk add-on program that makes the “current” folder point to a new YYYY-MM folder.
If anyone knows where this program is, please add a comment below.
I do know that it finishes at about 6am with a new empty directory for this month with no statistics files in it. I can tell the cron to run my plesk-awstats-fixer.sh program to run any time before awstat gets run for the second day’s statistics.
0 10 1 * * plesk-awstats-fixer.sh > paf.out 2> paf.err
Code:
#!/bin/bash | |
# | |
# This code was written by BigSoft Limited. | |
# Please include this message when you use the code in any form. | |
# Code comes as is and without warrenty | |
# | |
# David Newcomb (c) BigSoft Limited 2008 | |
# | |
| |
# Get MySQL's admin password | |
PSA_PW=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` | |
PSA_USER=admin | |
| |
# Location of webstats folders | |
VHOST=/var/www/vhosts | |
STATS=statistics/webstat | |
| |
# Find enabled domain names that use awstats statistics. | |
# When a client is deactivated the status of a domain | |
# becomes non-zero, so there is no need to join on the | |
# client's table. | |
| |
SQL=" SELECT d.name" | |
SQL="$SQL FROM domains d, hosting h" | |
SQL="$SQL WHERE d.id = h.dom_id" | |
SQL="$SQL AND d.status = 0" | |
SQL="$SQL AND h.webstat = 'awstats'" | |
| |
# Run SQL | |
DOMAINS=`mysql --skip-column-names -u$PSA_USER -p$PSA_PW -e"$SQL" psa` | |
| |
for DOMAIN in $DOMAINS | |
do | |
| |
AWSTATS_DIR=$VHOST/$DOMAIN/$STATS | |
| |
echo "Checking $AWSTATS_DIR" | |
if [ ! -d "$AWSTATS_DIR" ] | |
then | |
echo "Sorry awstats folder does not exist: $AWSTATS_DIR" | |
continue | |
fi | |
| |
cd $AWSTATS_DIR | |
CUR=`ls -l current` | |
| |
YEAR_MONTH=${CUR:2-10} | |
MONTH=${YEAR_MONTH:6} | |
YEAR=${YEAR_MONTH:1:4} | |
| |
# Sort out the number padding | |
if [ "$MONTH" = "01" ] | |
then | |
LAST_MONTH=12 | |
LAST_YEAR=`expr $YEAR - 1` | |
else | |
LAST_MONTH=`expr $MONTH - 1` | |
if [ "$LAST_MONTH" -lt "10" ] | |
then | |
LAST_MONTH="0$LAST_MONTH" | |
fi | |
LAST_YEAR=$YEAR | |
fi | |
echo "Found $YEAR_MONTH $YEAR $MONTH => $LAST_YEAR $LAST_MONTH" | |
| |
# Copy all the history files into place | |
echo "Copying $LAST_YEAR-$LAST_MONTH/awstats[012][0-9]$LAST_YEAR.$DOMAIN-http.txt" | |
cp -p $LAST_YEAR-$LAST_MONTH/awstats[012][0-9]$LAST_YEAR.$DOMAIN-http.txt current | |
| |
done |
8 comments
Changed the "let" statements to "expr" commands because "let" was being a bit funny about leading zeros. Sorry for any inconvenience. 
I've just upgraded Plesk to from 8.3 to 8.6 have Parallels fixed this problem in 8.6 ? As far as I'm aware this problem still exists in version Plesk 9+! Using Plesk 9.5.3 I ran this script it copies the old stats txt files to current month folder but when I update AWstats the monthly history section still only shows current month ?? If it is still showing current only then it is not picking up the stats that should have been copied in. You'll probably need to fiddle with the time that awstats runs in the cron so that it runs after plesk-awstats-fixer.sh.I'm not sure running awstats by hand does the same thing, so you'll have to play with the cron timer to get the timing right.
I manually copied historical text files to /var/www/vhosts/domain.co.uk/statistics/webstat and then updated awstats and that seems to work ... 
Did no one ever figure out where and how Plesk creates these directories? It would be SO easy to fix this issue if we could find that. It would! Plesk 8.4 is a bit old so I won't be spending any more time trying to figure this out. I can tell you that it is fixed in Plesk 10 along with the issue about getting the months in the drop down box in the wrong order.Maybe you could have a look!
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