info.michael-simons.eu

if you want something done right, do it yourself

If you happen to use the mint tracking tool like me, be careful when migrating from a 32bit to a 64bit server or vice versa. Mint saves ip addresses and a buttload of checksums as signed long values. That bites you right in the ass when the first visitors starts arriving at your site. All from 127.255.255.255, or at last visitors with an ip starting with > 127.

If you read this post before migrating, just add the following to your migration:

ALTER TABLE mint_visit 
  MODIFY COLUMN `ip_long` BIGINT NOT NULL,
  MODIFY COLUMN `referer_checksum` BIGINT NOT NULL,
  MODIFY COLUMN `domain_checksum` BIGINT NOT NULL,
  MODIFY COLUMN `resource_checksum` BIGINT NOT NULL,
  MODIFY COLUMN `session_checksum` BIGINT NOT NULL;
 
ALTER TABLE mint_debugger   
  MODIFY COLUMN `ip_long` BIGINT NOT NULL;
 
ALTER TABLE mint_geo  
  MODIFY COLUMN `ip` BIGINT NOT NULL;
 
ALTER TABLE mint_hostnames  
  MODIFY COLUMN `ip_long` BIGINT NOT NULL;

and you’re done.

If it’s too late, change your tables as well. You then also have to delete your entire mint_visit data, as the records are already corrupted. Great fail.

However, why on earth store an ip address as a long value?!? It’s an ip address and if i want to look at it, the program needs to go the other way round. To me: It’s just stupid fucking with datatypes and problems as that is what you get if you do so. It maybe makes sense for computation of networks, but not for a statistic tool. At least, i don’t see any sense in this.

Actually, the problem is known.