954,315 Members — Technology Publication meets Social Media
Username:
Password:
Lost login information?
Have something to say? Contribute New Article Reply to this Article

IIS question

When running IIS on 2k pro, is there a way to show the current connections, and which files are being accessed?

Phaelax
Practically a Posting Shark
858 posts since Mar 2004
Reputation Points: 92
Solved Threads: 51
 

No. The question actually has no meaning with any web server, because they don't maintain connections at all. Although you get the impression you are "connected" to a site, actaully you are only connected for the length of time it takes to send the requested page to your web browser and then you're disconnected until you request another page. This is why web connections are referred to as "stateless", because no state of connection is ever maintained. The best you can do is configure and examine the web server log files which attempt to do what you ask. But they are always considerably "after the fact" and only really approximate things. To make any sense of them you'll need a log analysis tool. AWStats and Analog are 2 free ones that come to mind, little bit of a job setting them up though. Hope it helps.

bentkey
Posting Whiz
321 posts since Apr 2004
Reputation Points: 24
Solved Threads: 8
 

what about the ftp?

Phaelax
Practically a Posting Shark
858 posts since Mar 2004
Reputation Points: 92
Solved Threads: 51
 

Sorry, I missed your post. Ftp does use connected state and you can see the active connections in the ftp site properties box, but it won't show what the users are accessing. I really don't know if there is a way to do that with other software or not. ftp logging is similar to web logging.

bentkey
Posting Whiz
321 posts since Apr 2004
Reputation Points: 24
Solved Threads: 8
 

Question moved to IIS forum.

cscgal
The Queen of DaniWeb
Administrator
19,421 posts since Feb 2002
Reputation Points: 1,474
Solved Threads: 229
 

Technically at any given time, you could run a netstat -an to get the sessions, then grab the output from a utility called filemon which monitors all file activity, you can't tell which ip is getting what but it does give you a good suggestion on how many connections there are and what % of them are grabbing a particular file.

blud
Linux Reject
Staff Writer
830 posts since Apr 2004
Reputation Points: 154
Solved Threads: 20
 
No. The question actually has no meaning with any web server, because they don't maintain connections at all. Although you get the impression you are "connected" to a site, actaully you are only connected for the length of time it takes to send the requested page to your web browser and then you're disconnected until you request another page. This is why web connections are referred to as "stateless", because no state of connection is ever maintained. The best you can do is configure and examine the web server log files which attempt to do what you ask. But they are always considerably "after the fact" and only really approximate things. To make any sense of them you'll need a log analysis tool. AWStats and Analog are 2 free ones that come to mind, little bit of a job setting them up though. Hope it helps.

Actually bentkey, the information you've provided is not accurate. First of all, the client's connection to a webserver (IIS in this case) doesn't simply die. The connection won't actually get tombstoned if the server has activated keep-alives in order to maintain said connection. This is done so that the server doesn't have to waste the resources of re-establishing a connection with each request.

Furthermore, while it is possible (albeit a poor approach) to go log monitoring, it is a much better idea to hook into IIS and read the requests as they come in. On that note, FTP does maintain a connection, and requests can be extrapolated in much the same way.

Now you know. :cool:

CSharper MCP, MCP+I, MCSE, MCAD, MCSD, MCT

CSharper
Newbie Poster
1 post since May 2005
Reputation Points: 10
Solved Threads: 0
 

This article has been dead for over three months

Post: Markdown Syntax: Formatting Help
You