I may have figured out a workaround and must say I have not done this much on the command line perhaps ever (including a rather empowering first use of “wget”).
I ended up compiling a new binary with an attempt to tell webalizer where the find the elusive libdb-4.4.so when using the latest version 2.21-02.
Here are the commands I used while in my home directory:
wget ftp://ftp.mrunix.net/pub/webalizer/webalizer-2.21-02-src.tgz
tar zxf webalizer-2.21-02-src.tgz
cd webalizer-2.21-02
./configure --prefix=$HOME/webalizer --with-libdb-4.4.so=[result of running locate libdb-4.4.so in shell]
make
make install
There was still an error about finding libdb-4.4.so with the report that geographic lookup would not be possible. Which is all right since this had not worked before either and was not a concern of mine. There was also a lot of warnings as a result of the “make” step that I could not quite decipher.
I navigated to the new /home/USER/webalizer/bin and ran:
Reported “Warning! 3 month gap detected” since it had been since March, but otherwise a success. The only lingering issue was how the current log files only of course cover one day, so I may create some new conf files to recover from what logs are available (generally only the minimum 3 days for me)…if I care that much of course!
Why do all this? I simply find the Webalizer results to be the most useful of any stats I have seen. The default DH stats are hard to read (but I did not turn them off so I’ll have an idea of these missing months) and anything with analytics (Google, etc.) will not work for my main site of downloadable files–which cannot contain the required javascript codes.
Anyway, hope this helps someone else coming later, and if anyone has ideas on compiling with the correct libdb location please share. I used the exact results from the “locate” command, but I wonder if I was one of more directory levels off, revealing my general unfamiliarity with the inner workings of unix.