Java User-Agent detector and caching

It’s often important for a server side application to understand the client platform. There are two common methods used for this.

  1. On the client itself, “capabilities” can be tested.
  2. Unfortunately, the server cannot easily test these, and as such must usually rely upon the HTTP Header information, notably “User-Agent”.

Example User-agent might typically look like this for a common desktop browser, developers can usually determine the platform without a lot of work.

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.3)"

Determining robots and mobile platforms, unfortunately is a lot more difficult due to the variations. Libraries as those described below simplify this work as standard Java Objects expose the attributes that are commonly expected.

With Maven, the dependencies are all resolved with the following POM addition:

<dependency>
<groupid>net.sf.uadetector</groupid>
<artifactid>uadetector-resources</artifactid>
<version>2014.10</version>
</dependency>


/* Get an UserAgentStringParser and analyze the requesting client */
final UserAgentStringParser parser = UADetectorServiceFactory.getResourceModuleParser();
final ReadableUserAgent agent = parser.parse(request.getHeader("User-Agent"));

out.append("You're a '");
out.append(agent.getName());
out.append("' on '");
out.append(agent.getOperatingSystem().getName());
out.append("'.");

As indicated on the website documentation, running this query for each request uses valuable server resources, it’s best to cache the responses to minimize the impact!

http://uadetector.sourceforge.net/usage.html#improve_performance

NOTE: the website caching example is hard to copy-paste, here’s a cleaner copy.


/*
* COPYRIGHT.
*/
package com.example.cache;

import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import net.sf.uadetector.ReadableUserAgent;
import net.sf.uadetector.UserAgentStringParser;
import net.sf.uadetector.service.UADetectorServiceFactory;
import com.google.common.cache.Cache;
import com.google.common.cache.CacheBuilder;

/**
* Caching User Agent parser
* @see http://uadetector.sourceforge.net/usage.html#improve_performance
* @author Scott Fredrickson [skotfred]
* @since 2015jan28
* @version 2015jan28
*/
public final class CachedUserAgentStringParser implements UserAgentStringParser {

private final UserAgentStringParser parser = UADetectorServiceFactory.getCachingAndUpdatingParser();
private static final int CACHE_MAX_SIZE = 100;
private static final int CACHE_MAX_HOURS = 2;
/**
* Limited to 100 elements for 2 hours!
*/
private final Cache<String , ReadableUserAgent> cache = CacheBuilder.newBuilder().maximumSize(CACHE_MAX_SIZE).expireAfterWrite(CACHE_MAX_HOURS, TimeUnit.HOURS).build();

/**
* @return {@code String}
*/
@Override
public String getDataVersion() {
return parser.getDataVersion();
}
/**
* @param userAgentString {@code String}
* @return {@link ReadableUserAgent}
*/
@Override
public ReadableUserAgent parse(final String userAgentString) {
ReadableUserAgent result = cache.getIfPresent(userAgentString);
if (result == null) {
result = parser.parse(userAgentString);
cache.put(userAgentString, result);
}
return result;
}
/**
*
*/
@Override
public void shutdown() {
parser.shutdown();
}
}

REFERENCES:

Disable Cisco NAC Agent logging

I recently had to use a Windows computer with Cisco NAC installed, and found that there was a lot of disk activity for logging.

These files would grow to approximately 5MB before rotation.

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Cisco\Cisco NAC Agent\logs\NACAgentLogCurrent.log
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Cisco\Cisco NAC Agent\logs\NACAgentLogOld.log

To reduce this overhead (when no problems exist), the config file is exposed in XML.

  1. Open C:\Program Files\Cisco\Cisco NAC Agent\NACAgentCFG.xml
  2. Add/modify the LogFileSize attribute to 0 (zero) as shown below:

    <?xml version="1.0" ?>
    <cfg>
    <DiscoveryHost></DiscoveryHost>
    <LogFileSize>0</LogFileSize><!-- default 5 -->
    </cfg>
  3. Reboot
  4. Remove the old .log files

NOTE: if you ever have networking issues and require support, you will need to restore the default value to ‘5’.

REFERENCES:

Masquerading browser User-Agent strings

As it’s Halloween, it’s only relevant that I share a method of covering your browsers identity.

  • For MSIE, you must modify the registry. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]
  • For Chrome (on Windows, and I assume other OS’s), you can use a startup parameter.
    C:\Users\{USERID}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_0; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.21.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.5 Safari/533.21.1"
  • For Firefox and other Mozilla based browsers, you can mofiy the configuration in (user.js) or use a variety of add-on extensions, such as:

Interested in knowing your current User-Agent, just visit one of the following:

Many robots and spiders that are used by search engines also identify themselves by their User-Agent, if you see this activity in your logs you can often learn more about it at:

REFERENCES:

Happy Halloween!