Needing new command line option

[Riku Meskanen]

Hello,

My first post to this list :)

I've made a patch (attached) to dhcp-4.2.4-P2 that introduces
new command line option "-lf log-tag" to prepend any logs and 
messages of dhcpd process with given tag.

Need and justification of the tag comes from two scenarios
i can at least think of, latter which we had to deal with lately.

1)	while testing new configuration in system which
	already is running another process providing dhcp
	service and you want to be absolutely sure which
	process logged which lines.

2) 	while running multiple dhcpd server instances
	which each bound to different interface and you
	would like to be able to have a log analyzer 
	(splunk or whatever like) where logs are forwarded
	with common public interface have capablity
	to analyze each servers logs separately.

(The need to run multiple dhcpd processes in one
server comes from the fact that we provide dhcp
services to distinct, non connected networks with
completely different globals and ip-nettworks and
when you get enough of these servers with redundant
pairs you start wondering wouldn't it be easier if you
had even few less of the servers ... and yes you can
have, it's just matter of effort to set up and it works
really well as long as more interfaces last ... you
can and we use server virtualisation, but running
redundant OS's just for dhcpd is bit lame AFAIK.

For the curious these separate networks, those are 
lab's, guest-nets etc. and few networks kept separate 
for security reasons which of course will still have 
dedicated servers for them.  In our case the 
implementation is with university wide
MPLS-VPN's & 802.1q VLANs at edge.)

In theory and in practice it's possible to use syslog 
facility (set in config) but facilities are very limited 
resource and when in large environment you easily 
run out of facilities available and have difficulties keeping
things separate at log analyser because you have
so many sources of the information logged there.

This made me do this fairly trivial patch and I thought
that it would be great if that was a standard feature
of the ISC dhcpd daemon. That would save us patching
it each time after new releases and possibly someone
else would benefit with a similar situation too :)

We have given it a whirl few days now and it seems
to solve the problem separating logged lines very
easily and nicely. 

This patch is for the last release, but if you accept
it and would like to have it adapted to other older
still supported version I would be glad to put that 
together too for you.

:-) riku

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