[squid-users] Re: Real hit count of a user? Can it be really found?

Hi,

I am trying to count web hits of users. With using proxy it is seems to be easy (I tried combinations of squid, tiny, privoxy in transparent modes).
But it is obvious that the hits in the logs not purely the hits that users wanted to do.
For example when a user goes to cnn.com, cnn.com calls other ad pages or non-ad pages and it is seen as an user hit in logs. So for real hit count an analysis must be made on logs.
Do you know any tool, proxy that can help in such analysis?

Second choice is writing own tool that can be parsing the logs and doing an analysis on referer field. But solely depending on referer can cause false positive results for users clicking on a link on a page.
To further investigate the issue I listened (by ethereal) outgoing packets for a usual user behavior (clicking on a link) and page calling pages. In request packets they all seem to have same headers and similar header values. So I stucked and could not found any possible piece of evidence to track and distinguish the hits.
Is there a known theoretical or practical way for distinguishing this behaviours?

AB
Received on Thu Mar 06 2008 - 06:32:02 MST