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Postings from July 2001
Folks, I am interesting in testing the appetite for modifying the Sys::Syslog module in order to allow different connection backends. I've looked around, but have so far found no interesting developments in this area to date. The problem: currently, Sys::Syslog defaults to a udp connection, but also allows for a unix domain socket. However, there are a variety of platforms in existence for which neither of those are default, or even possible in some configurations. For example, syslog-ng (and secure syslog) provide a TCP interfaces, as do the IETF proposals for 'reliable syslog'. Also, the solaris syslog daemon, by default, listens on a stream interface which from observation does not work well when treated as a unix domain socket (although that could just be me :). So, I'd like to get the Syslog module to work with these other scenarios. Note that I don't like the idea of having to use setlogsock(), since that involves changing existing code (possibly vendor code) - I'd rather the Syslog.pm handle that abstraction for me. To try out my thoughts, I've modified a local copy of Sys::Syslog to have a variety of different connection backends for it to use as a communication method to the daemon. It works well in that I can take a perl program which uses Sys::Syslog and it correctly logs whether it's on a machine with 'standard' UDP syslog, or on a machine running Syslog-NG which is only listening for TCP connections. The code that I have is available on request, but the basic idea is that it has backend 'drivers' for different connection methods and it takes a list of drivers to attempt. The best method which succeeds at connection is used. When a failure is detected, it re-evaluates this connection loop to get to an alternative backend. What I'd like to see is if there is interest in this kind of enhancement making it into the core module, or if not, then ideas on different ways of getting to a solution. Cheers, Nick. p.s. I know that the other alternative is to XS the libc version of syslog, which is an attractive idea since it would mean that all applications on the box perl or C would be using a consistent method for logging... however XS has its woes - this perl module is a trivial implementation and it actually provides better functionality and failover handling than libc would.Thread Next