Handling of duplicates in clients.conf

[A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk]

Hi,

> I'm running FR 2.0.3 and I just found that if there is more than one
> client with the same IP address in clients.conf, then it will stop
> processing the remainder of the file and continue startup.  The only
> indication it has done this are 2 error messages that are easily missed
> when running with debug on.  I checked git.freeradius.org and noticed
> that the client.c committed on 09-March now ignores duplicates if they
> are exactly the same.  In my case, everything was the same except the
> name.  My question is, wouldn't it be better to continue processing the
> remainder of the file even when there are duplicates that aren't
> identical or alternatively to preclude the server from starting (I'd
> vote for the former).  Ignoring what could be hundreds of clients that
> follow the error doesn't seem useful.  

ouch - random working process that is happy if the wind blows in the right
direction.  no, the code is simply allowing only exact duplicates
to be ignored as errors...which is quirky but stop s afew issues.
anyway, another reason to use SQL as the client storage engine - you
can put column restraints in which make each field enforced as unique
-IP address, name, shortname etc. thus you'll never get the chance
of having a duplicate in the first place.... apart from when you first
start trying SQL clients and still have real entries in clients.conf  ;-)

alan