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I am trying to figure out a way to in real time see people downloading files to ensure that the download from that person is successful. I cant seem to get the search string right to find what i need. Any help is appreciated!

I do have some bash scripts i created to real-time monitor my HTTP login, Mail, SSH, and a couple other things along with port connections and load.

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2 Answers 2

Add %X to you log config.

X = connection aborted before the response completed.
- = connection will be closed after the response is sent.

Also take a look at this module http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_logio.html


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ill give it a try, thanks! –  user160246 Aug 9 '13 at 18:08
already had that mod installed and loaded, tried it, that will work for me, thanks so much! –  user160246 Aug 9 '13 at 18:38

It's going to be very difficult to (on the server) check if somebody successfully downloaded a file.

I imagine if this is going to work you may need to program the download in such a way that it streams the data and do checks along the way. This does seem difficult in the end as getting access to the downloaded file (to verify it) could be troublesome and raise security concerns.

It would be easier to ask the users to do an md5 checksum. After the user downloads the file they can do the following in terminal:

user$ md5 test-file.txt 
MD5 (test-file.txt) = d8e8fca2dc0f896fd7cb4cb0031ba249

This is common practice and you can list the md5 on your site so that users can manually verify the download.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve you may be able to develop something on the server that does the md5 on the clients downloaded file for you.

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i figured as much, but thought i'd ask! –  user160246 Aug 9 '13 at 18:08

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