unique readers

Joe St Sauver JOE at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Tue Jun 11 17:47:53 UTC 2002


>What ways are there to count the number of unique USERS of my news server?

It would probably be helpful to know more about what you're trying to do 
with the value you construct, e.g., justify an upgrade ("EVERYONE is reading
news these days!") or associate traffic with particular users for accounting 
purposes or ? Do you care about readers vs. posters?

>The NNRP readership stats unfortunately don't appear to be good enough.  These 
>daily stats count readership by IP address or number (if it can't resolve).  
>Unfortunately we experience name re-use due to some of the methods (VPN, 
>dial-up,etc) that people are using to get to our intranet and then to my news 
>server.  And there are also the few multi-user machines as well.

What operating system are you running under? Would something like the 
expanded logging available from TCP wrappers handle the majority of what
you need (e.g., do your multi-user machines run identd)? Is it an issue
(or a plus) that TCP wrappers aren't integrated into INN's logging and
reporting?

And do you care about corner cases such as:

   -- a single user who has opened multiple concurrent sessions at the same
      time from the same address? (e.g., some of the more agressive binary
      downloading tools)

   -- multiple users sharing a single system (classic example: shared machine
      in a common area, or officemates or roommates sharing a single system)

   -- multiple users sharing a single "personally assigned" username? (you'll
      know it is happening when the same user "logs in" from two geographically
      remote locations at the same time)

Would an NNTP equivalent of HTTP's cookie state setting and preservation 
technology accomplish what you want to do?

Regards,

Joe


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