How to see the localhost traffic details?

Question

I have hosted my website over the local network in ubuntu maverick. I want to see all the requests coming in to my website through terminal and then log it into a file. What should i use? and is it possible to see all the ip address which has sent the request? i am using xampp server. thank you.

Answer 1

What you want to see should be already getting logged in the Apache logs. They already include the source IP address of each request, and several other pieces of information.

If you're using xampp I think the logs are kept in /opt/lampp/logs/. The requests are logged in access_log, or ssl_request_log if you're using SSL. The errors go to error_log.

To see a log in real time you could use:

tail -f /opt/lampp/logs/access_log

(Use Ctrl+C to stop it)

Or, you could see more than one log at a time, using multitail.

First, install multitail if it's not installed already:

sudo apt-get install multitail

Then:

multitail /opt/lampp/logs/access_log /opt/lampp/logs/error_log

(Press q to close it)

You can pass it whatever logs you want to watch.

---

If what you need is lower-level information, then there are several other choices, like Wireshark, nmap/zenmap, tcpdump. I'm not going into details here, because I guess these are too low-level for your needs, but I mention them for completeness.