Nginx Logging exclusion help

[sandyk007]

Hi,

I am quite new to NGINx; but have used this for pop proxy; light web-servers & quite fascinated with the results.

Right now facing part as far logging is concerned. I certain
hits in logs; which are just opening connections & dont transmit
anything & close the connection or are disconnected after
time-outs. So some entries of no requests format & error as 408 get
recorded in logs; which makes centralised logging system go hay-wire.

I would like to avoid logging such entries as done in apache;
which does not logs 400 or 408 or any telnet requests w/o passing any
headers.

Some of options tried are as follows (but havent helped) :

## If request not as GET / POST / HEAD request methods
    if ($request_method !~ ^(GET|HEAD|POST)$ ) {
    return 444;

Access log:

log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '

                    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '

                    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_cookie" ';

Detailed Logs:
------------------------
89.5.0.243 - - [25/May/2009:14:27:54 +0530] "-" 408 0 "-" "-" "-"
XXX.XXX.XXX.5 - - [25/May/2009:14:26:32 +0530] "GET /health.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 3 "-" "-" "-"
XXX.XXX.XXX.6 - - [25/May/2009:14:26:23 +0530] "GET /health.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 3 "-" "-" "-"
67.161.28.173 - - [25/May/2009:14:26:22 +0530] "-" 400 0 "-" "-" "-"

In order to replicate this scenario; just try telneting to your Nginx server:port & disconnect w/o passing any request of GET/POST; you would have 400 error in logs.

Conf Details:
--------------------------
user nobody;
worker_processes  10;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/logs/error_log debug;
pid        /var/log/nginx/logs/nginx.pid;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
  include       mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;
  ## Timeouts
  client_body_timeout   120;
  client_header_timeout 120;
  keepalive_timeout     5 5;
  send_timeout          5;

  ## General Options
  ignore_invalid_headers   on;
  limit_zone gulag $binary_remote_addr 1m;
  recursive_error_pages    on;
  sendfile                 on;
  server_name_in_redirect off;
  server_tokens           off;

  ## TCP options
  tcp_nodelay on;
  tcp_nopush  on;

  ## Logging & Formats
  log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_cookie" ';
    server {
    listen       8081;
    server_tokens off;
    server_name  metrics.example.com metric.example.com;
    access_log  /var/log/httpd/logs/example/access_log  main;

    location / {
    root   /home/httpd/html/example;
    index  index.php index.html;

## If request  not as GET , HEAD, POST request methods dont log the requests
    if ($request_method !~ ^(GET|HEAD|POST)$ ) {
    access_log off;
                                               }
    if ($host ~ "^(.*)example.com") {
    rewrite . /blank.html break;
    expires       -1;
                                          }
               }
    }

Any help you would be highly appreciable.

Regards,
Sandesh K

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,2627,2627#msg-2627