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I'm using hiawatha on a DNS server. So the name resolution is quite good. But I can't figure out how to get the HOST names
in the log files, as opposed to just IP's. Hiawatha also doesn't seem to be able to return something as simple as

$ENV{REMOTE_HOST}

.
What am I doing wrong?

Thank you for all your time, and consideration.

--Chris

That's probably not a good idea. Real-time hostname lookups can cause a delay in the server response.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/core.html#hostnamelookups

Better to use something like Apache's logrotate program to process the logs after the fact.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/programs/logresolve.html

Hello Joe,
I humbly disagree. Name resolution doesn't require blocking, as so many of the implementations do -- like The [ISC] Bind, for example.
It's horribly, and unnecessairly inefficient. Lookups, more often than not, only require mere milliseconds. I became frustrated with the DNS (software) available, and looked to create one from scratch. I nearly finished it, but didn't. But out of it, I created an asynchronous resolver. On standard CPE, it easily resolves 255 addresses in ~2 seconds. How many hiawatha installs have that kind of traffic? My point is; it seems that most anyone that thinks the overhead of name resolution is too high. Have little real understanding of whats actually required, and involved. Or perhaps more accurately; their experiences with name resolution, has been with bad implementations, where the requests were blocking calls. Meaning; everything came to a stop, until the request was answered.
Anyway, it appears that you've answered my question, Joe. Hiawatha doesn't perform any kind of IP-to-HOST function. I tested
further, and found that the only way I was able to gather the HOST name

$ENV{REMOTE_HOST}

of the connecting client, was to implement a function of my own, in Perl:

use Socket;
...
my $remote_ip = $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR};
# a re-implementation of CGI: the Common Gateway Interface (http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/overview.html)
# the following is a blocking request, but a reasonable timeout can be easily added
my $remote_host = gethostbyaddr(inet_aton($remote_ip), AF_INET);

It's the only way I can effectively populate the CGI environment variable that was created, and available with the first HTTPd ever created: NCSA HTTPD. Anyway, it looks like CGI isn't fully available in Hiawatha. Or at least not fully exposed to the user. I guess I'll have to hack on the Hiawatha code, and create a slightly more robust version.

Thanks Joe, for taking the time to reply!

--Chris

I solved a problem just yesterday (what a coincidence!) where Mac (but not Windows) clients were experiencing a 4-6 second delay connecting to a local Java web application running on Windows and Apache. The culprit was that HostnameLookups were turned on, but it was not able to resolve IP addresses for Mac clients since they had private IP addresses and were not connected to the Windows domain.

So its not only traffic issues that can cause problems. In this case it was a bad implementation combined with a bad configuation.

Heh. Nice thing about options; they're optional.