Needing new command line option

[Cathy Almond]

Hi Riku,

This seems like a good idea although I'm not sure how widespread the
need for it would be.  I've opened a feature request ticket on your
behalf (you should have email from our tracking system about it).

It's reference RT #31547 "Command line option to prefix dhcpd logging
with a given tag"

Kind regards,

Cathy

On 20/10/12 18:32, Riku Meskanen wrote:
> 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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