OPS435 Python Assignment 1 2017 - 3

Assignment 1 - Parsing a log file

Weight: 15% of the overall grade.

Due Date: Ask your professor for exact date.

Late penalty: 10% per day (including weekends), and the assignment must be completed in order to pass the course.

Overview

Often, system administrators need to analyze log files. This can be done using a paginator such as less when your system has just been set up and/or you're the only user. On a production system it is not unusual to have thousands of legitimate users per month accessing the server's services, plus thousands more bots looking for unpatched vulnerabilities, brute-forcing username/password pairs, or just downloading every available file on your web server.

In this assignment you will create a program that will help you as a Apache server administrator to answer questions about the status, load, and security of your web server. You will not need to set up a mail server for this assignment, though you're welcome to use the one you've set up in OPS335 as a practice machine.

Instructions

Name and Parameters

Your Python3 program will be named check_apache_log.py and it will accept the following parameters:

• --default or -d as an optional first argument, followed by:
• filename, or:
• filename1 filename2 filename3 etc... - any number of filenames from 1 to as many as the command-line supports.

Header

Your program must be a single source file, and at the top of that file it will contain the following true statement as a comment (replace Andrew Smith with your own name):

OPS435 Assignment 1 - Fall 2017
check_apache_log.py
Author: Andrew Smith
The source code in this file (check_apache_log.py) is original work written 
by Andrew Smith and has not been copied from any other source including any
person, textbook, or online resource. I have not shared this work with anyone
or anything except for submission for grading. I understand that the 
Academic Honesty Policy is not a joke and violators will be punished.