Edimax EW-7811Un on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I’ve recently re-purposed my old desktop PC to be a server running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. As it’s an old box it’s not exactly quiet so I placed it under the stairs which posed a problem connection wise. In the end I decided to connect it up via wireless rather than run an Ethernet cable to it, so after doing a bit of research I went for the Edimax EW-7811Un nano USB adaptor from Amazon.

According to the Edimax web site Linux drivers were available for it and there were a few posts on the Ubuntu forums & wiki saying that people had got it working:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1590873
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1744371
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HardwareSupportComponentsWirelessNetworkCardsEdimax

The USB adaptor uses the RealTek rtl8192cu chip according to this Debian wiki page and the filename of the Edimax driver package.

I tried the Edimax drivers first but I was getting pretty random results so I switched to RealTek’s  own drivers which seemed a lot more stable, and they seem to update them quite often too.

How to generate stats for IIS log files using Webalizer

While sorting through some of my many backups of old machines I came across a whole load of IIS log files for an old site of mine so I thought I’d process them and generate some statistics. I’ve used Webalizer quite a few times before for generating stats on Apache log files and as v2.01 is available via Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu I thought I’d use this.

Unfortunately v2.01 doesn’t support support the W3C format that IIS uses, looks like it does now in v2.20 though. However IIS includes a utility called ‘convlog‘ for converting it’s logs files to the NCSA common log file format that Webalizer does support. So I fired up my old Windows XP box, installed IIS and used the following command to convert the log files:

convlog -ie ex*.log

Once that had processed all the log files (by default it creates a copy of each log file) I copied them back to my Ubuntu laptop and used ‘cat‘ to combine all the files into one big log file:

cat ex*.nsca > master.log

All that was left to do was create a config file to tell Webalizer what it should do, so I copied the default config file and customised the options to my needs. Then ran ‘webalizer‘ using the customised config file:

./webalizer -c master.conf

Once it’s performed it’s magic you should have a bunch of detailed reports in the location you specified in the config file!