[Ops] UserAgentUsage

Wed Dec 5 02:59:10 CET 2018

The first bit of this discussion i heard at the IVOA meeting College Park.

I think putting the (ivoa-validator ...) tag in the UA string is a fine
idea - in fact, i am already looking for it in NED logs.
I am not sure looking at the UserAgentUsage wikipage if its
ivoa-validate or ivoa-validator ??

I like the idea of having a URL for more information (contact, and
links to public results ... anything related to the validator.)
But please stop there.  The simple example strings in the Usage note,
are just right.

The client can put more information into
 HTTP headers X-IVOA-whatever
and operators can log those if they like.
but opening UA strings to an entire dictionary of ancillary information
makes the string horrendously long.

The URL should provide more information, not just results: operational information
(how often it runs,  target list, who to contact and how for trouble, all
on a webpage.) would be really useful sometimes ... 

I don't think the there needs to be keywords, provided the strings ID, and URL
are unbroken by whitespace).

Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)
is a perfectly legitimate UA string.  To have a string that can be
detected no matter what combination of tools is involved is handy.
IVOAbot/3.1 (+https://www.botinfo.edu/) STILTS/3.1-4

With NED, if you declare your client as a 'Bot' we are unlikely to
count it as "science use" - but it would be nice to have even in
those cases a way to say we supported 40,000 ivoa service validation
requests this year.

To have a string that can be detected no matter what combination of
tools is involved is handy - which is why i like putting the
(ivoa-validate +https://url...) in the UA.

In addition to validate,monitor,harvest, a  "proxy"  (or "user")
op-purpose could indicate explicitly that the query is being made
in direct response to a science user query at a higher layer
( in other words "definitely count this" as use of the VO).
But this starts to go beyond the idea of the UA string and creates
more clutter.

Again for this, I would suggest taking it ALL out of the UA string,
except the
  (ivoa-validate +https//inforurl.org/)
and put the deeper information in a separate HTTP: header

Rick...

On 12/4/18 9:02 AM, Tom McGlynn (NASA/GSFC Code 660.1) wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> This looks fine to me generally, but I'm a little concerned that if it
> turns out to be useful then we may have made it difficult to expand the
> kinds of additional information that are included in the comment.  Right
> now the only additional information we are considering is the URL at
> which the validation results may
> be seen.  That's probably all we'll need, but it seems to me that we'd
> leave it a little more open if we were to include a standard prefix so
> that if we
> eventually want to provide something else we can just use a different
> prefix.  E.g., you give the example
> 
> User-Agent: STILTS/3.1-4 (ivoa-validator http://validators.org/results)
> Java/1.8.0_181
> 
> Here the ivoa- lets us know we've got some IVOA ops info here.  The
> validator gives us the specific usage, and the
> http://validators.org/results is where validator results are given.  I'd
> like to see that last a little more explicit as
> 
> User-Agent: STILTS/3.1-4 (ivoa-validator
> resultURL=http://validators.org/results) Java/1.8.0_181
> 
> where we've agreed that resultURL (or some other string) defines what
> the token i.  Next year if this turns out to be popular we could add some
> other (presumably optional) keyword to give some other information. 
> Even now, this allows the provider to include information they think is
> important
> that isn't the results URL.
> 
> Just to give an example, maybe the querier wants to indicate the
> standard[s] being validated, so they'd put
> 
> User-Agent: STILTS/3.1-4 (ivoa-validator
> resultURL=http://validators.org/results standard=sia2.0,votable1.4)
> Java/1.8.0_181
> 
> or instead of a URL for the results, an Email to contact with questions
> 
> User-Agent: STILTS/3.1-4 (ivoa-validator contact=ops at institution.edu)
> Java/1.8.0_181
> 
> What do you think?
> 
>      Tom
> 
> Mark Taylor wrote:
>> Dear Ops,
>>
>> at the recent Interop we had some discussions about how we can/should
>> use the User-Agent HTTP header to allow service operators to identify
>> requests originating from things like validators as distinct from
>> user science requests.  Following this, I have drafted some text
>> on this wiki page:
>>
>>     http://wiki.ivoa.net/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/UserAgentUsage
>>
>> I think it more or less reflects what we concluded at College Park,
>> but there are a few details and open questions I've filled in.
>> If you're interested in this topic, please take a look and
>> post comments here or to me, or just edit the wiki page.
>>
>> If people are in agreement with this approach, I'll try to
>> implement it in my clients, and we can talk about whether it
>> makes sense to issue it as an IVOA Note.
>>
>> Mark
>>
>> -- 
>> Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
>> m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
>> _______________________________________________
>> ops mailing list
>> ops at ivoa.net
>> http://mail.ivoa.net/mailman/listinfo/ops
> 
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> http://mail.ivoa.net/mailman/listinfo/ops
> 
> 

-- 
Rick Ebert
Caltech/IPAC
Engineer, NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database