Needing new command line option

[Riku Meskanen]

On 22 Oct 2012, at 22:23, "Paul B. Henson" <henson at acm.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 05:14:31PM +0300, Riku Meskanen wrote:
> 
>> But certainly we're not the only ones running multiple dhcp
>> instances same server. Probably someone who is doing that
>> hasn't had (yet) the need to distinguish the logs so that (s)he
>> would know which line came to which instance. Or the ones
>> who are have been so lucky that they could solve the issue
>> with using the facilities, which did not yet run out that time.
> 
> Out of curiosity, why doesn't the already included log-facility feature
> meet your need? You have a requirement to have both instances log to the
> same file? You could use a better logger such as syslog-ng or rsyslog to
> add the prefix for you based on facility in that case...

Hmmm... I was thinking of simplicity. tagging at source 
the server instance and scalability.  Using local 8 facilities
adding tag and changing facility*) before forwarding to log
analyser could get quite hairy to maintain and avoid
breakage. Tagging at source would also be independent
of underlying log infrastructure platform provides.

*) can't use all local facilities just for this purpose
    at log analyser service as there are hundreds of 
    other servers and well over thousand network
    devices using many of them already.

Current servers are so powerful, we have plenty
of interfaces when using trunked ports et al. and we
could run 10-20 of dhcpd processes without penalty 
when each network has possibly hundred(s) or so clients 
with redundant pair server. Everything else seem 
quite easy to set up sharing the server pair already 
except that to keeping each instance logs separate
for troubleshooting, security and performance reasons.

Who else, beyond vendors selling OS licenses, want's
to have multiplicity of almost identically configured simple
and low load servers if you could quite easily do with few?

Sure maintaining large amounts of servers is easier now
too with nice tools like satellite etc. but still ...

It would be great to lose some of those redundant servers 
and  even CFO would be happy.

I like to emphasise that the idea and patch was for proposal 
to consider, sorry that I forgot the RFP: from the subject line
and I apologize writing long responses  possibly some busy
folks reading list feel too long to read.

But you are correct, I need to study further what rsyslog
and syslog-ng can provide. Possibly there was something
beyond what I was able yet to understand what those
could do to solve the issue.

:-) riiku

ps. 	proposed default tag format would propably be changed
	to one that ends with colon and space to comply with 
	RFC's. I had it first but changed unfortunately to brackets
	due proposal of a colleague that thought it would be
	more visible and easier to handle in log analyser.
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