missing user name in apache log file

Question

hy every body, We have dokeos application using apache as the web server. when accessing dokeos we have to login, So users who try to access this application , has to login using ID & pwd. But I don't have this ID information in the apache webserver log files. I mean "user name" information is not getting into the log files. Thanks.

Answer 1

You need to do authentication via HTTP headers for apache to log the info in the user field of the http logs. If the login to the application is via a form/cookies then apache does not consider the user authenticated.

Answer 2

I assume we're talking about application-level login, not http auth here?

If the form submitting the username/password uses POST as the form method, then the username is embedded in the http body - you won't see it logged on the URL.

EDIT:

I looked at their demo site. Here is the form tag for the login form:

 <form action="/index.php" method="post" name="formLogin" id="formLogin"> 

Because the method is post, you won't see the username/password in the logs. In most cases, this is a good idea for security purposes. If you need to track logins by user, and the application doesn't already have this, you could add some code to index.php where it processes the login to make a log entry an a separate file:

2009-12-16 11:55:00 User jsmith logged in from 192.168.1.123