User access logging

Madrigal now logs each time a user accesses data from a Madrigal data file. This log file is stored in madroot/metadata/userdata/access_<YYYY>.log. Each line in the log file has five comma-separated fields:

User name
User email
User affiliation
Time stamp <YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS>
Full path the Madrigal file accessed.

Sample:

Bill Rideout,brideout@haystack.mit.edu,MIT Haystack,2006-01-03 10-10-09,/opt/madrigal/experiments/2005/mlh/04sep05/mlh050904a.000
Bill Rideout,brideout@haystack.mit.edu,MIT Haystack,2006-01-03 10-10-10,/opt/madrigal/experiments/2005/mlh/04sep05/mlh050904b.000
Bill Rideout,brideout@haystack.mit.edu,MIT Haystack,2006-01-03 10-10-17,/opt/madrigal/experiments/2005/mlh/04sep05/mlh050904c.000

When a user is accessing Madrigal through the web, they will be asked for this information the first time they use the Data Access page. No attempt is made to verify the data they enter. This data is then stored as a cookie, and information from that cookie is used for this logging.

All the latest releases of the remote API also require the caller to supply these additional fields. However, if a user makes use of an old version of the remote API without these fields, that call will continue to work. In that case, the access will be logged as "Unknown".

The log file will automatically roll over once a year.