[analog-help] OS unknown

[Aengus]

On Friday, July 21, 2006 7:50 AM [EDT],
gsheu at tunl.duke.edu <gsheu at tunl.duke.edu> wrote:

> Our group have been using Analog since Apr. 2002 to see how often
> people
> access our website. In our reports, the average monthly #reqs under
> "OS unknown" in "Operating System Report" is as following:
>
>     Year       #reqs
> ------------------------
>     2002        1600
>     2003        2400
>     2004        4500
>     2005        8300
>     2006       19000
>
> You can see that the number is increasing each year. It seems not
> reasonable to count those #reqs as people "actually" using our
> websites. How can I determine if these OS unknown includes robots
> or search engines?

You can find a fairly comprehensive list of known Robots, nicely confgured 
as a ROBOTINCLUDE list at:
http://www.wadsack.com/robot-list.html

> How can I decrease the OS unknown numbers?

Browser strings usually indicate the OS that the browser is running on. If 
you do a full Browser Report (BROWSERREP ON) you should be able to pick out 
browsers that don't specify an OS. You can make this easier by specifying 
commands like
BROWREPEXCLUDE *Windows*
etc to exclude the known ones.

Once you get a list of Browser Strings that aren't recognized as Robots 
(with ROBOTINCUDE commands) and that don't include OS strings, you can use 
BROWALIAS commands to assign an Operating System.

Here's an example that changes a Browser from "OS Unknown" to "Windows XP":
BROWALIAS Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600 
"Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600 (Windows NT 5.1)"

Aengus