Module not loading

["Tomás A. Rossi"]

Alan DeKok escribió:
> =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Tom=E1s_A=2E_Rossi=22?= <tomas at mecon.gov.ar> wrote:
>   
>> That's not my point. I'm not trying to say that you should do that but 
>> rather to print some kind of message showing that the server has read 
>> the module instantiation.
>>     
>
>   Why?  It doesn't, in fact, read the module instantiation because it
> doesn't even look for it, because the module isn't being used.
>   
I mean a message saying something like:
*WARNING: module _blabla_ instantiated but not used, radiusd will ignore it*

>> FreeRADIUS is a very nice product though I think at least you should 
>> concede me that it lacks of good documentation IMHO.
>>     
>
>   You're joking, right?  Have you ever tried to use a *commercial*
> server?  Many of those make our documentation look world-leading.
>   
I've not used any other commercial server though I know what you're 
saying is very true by have listened from other people. No offense, but 
I still think FreeRADIUS *lacks* of an homogeneous and well organized 
documentation. I mean, don't take me as an ungrateful guy. We appreciate 
this product very much, I'm just trying to make some constructive 
criticism. If there could be some kind of index of contents for the docs 
(at least) one wouldn't have to search trying to guess upon the 
filenames which of those textfiles has the information I need. Maybe 
some PDF or html documentation some day would make the product more 
attractive.
Just a suggestion.
>> I was trying to add a module not knowing of the above mentioned
>> behavior.
>>     
>
>   No. You were trying to add a module without telling the server to
> use it, and you were surprised that the server didn't use it.
>   
No, I wasn't surprised by the server not using it but by the server not 
telling me anything about it.
>   If the server *had* printed out the message you wanted, odds are
> that your next question would be "why doesn't the server use the
> module when I send it a packet?  I listed it in the instantiate
> section!"
>   
This isn't true at all. In every moment I was conscious that the module 
wouldn't be used when some packet arrived, since I haven't included it 
in some of the other sections. If the right message were printed the 
odds would have been the opposite.
>   Yes, we've been through this dicussion before with other people.
> You're not the first to run into this.  And the end result of what you
> want is an endless series of messages explaining why the server isn't
> doing what you think it's doing.
>   
I can't see why.
>   It's a lot easier to have the server to print out what is *is*
> doing, and then tell people to read the documentation to see why it
> isn't doing what they expect.  Usually, their expectations are wrong,
> and the documentation contains the information to correct the
> expectation.
>   
Note that my suggestion only would have added a simple WARNING message 
saving you to discuss with that other people and about future concerns 
as well. Don't forget that many many people would try-and-test first and 
then read the docs (though I'm sure people finds difficult to navigate 
through README-based docs to find what they want to find). I'm not sure 
that what you say is in _every situation_ a lot easier.
>> It results in only adding the entry inside the instantiation section
>> and testing if 'radiusd -X' returned some message to give me a clue
>> that the module instantiation was parsed at least.
>>     
>
>   And what did you expect the server would do after that?  You still
> haven't answered that question.  So you're not explaining what you
> thought was going on, or what you were trying to do.  You're just
> complaining that the server isn't doing what you want.
>   
Sorry I didn't feel you've asked that question before though I'll 
answer: "I did NOT expect the server to do ANYTHING after that, just to 
tell me it PARSED the module instantiation". I thought the server wasn't 
parsing well 'radiusd.conf' or my module was having some kind of coding 
error preventing the server to load it.
Maybe my complain (I'll call it suggestion) is not that relevant to 
worth server modifications, it's only that I thought it was better for 
you to know in which whirlpool FreeRADIUS users get stuck in sometimes.

Kind regards,
---
Tomás A. Rossi
Ministerio de Economía
Proyecto de Informática
Buenos Aires, Argentina