home server debugging issues

[Josip Rodin]

Hi,

I upgraded one of our proxy servers from 2.0.4 to 2.1.7, and noticed that
the proxying changed in a way that "status_check = request" logic started
being critical, so this kind of stuff:

Sun Nov 22 09:25:56 2009 : Error: Rejecting request 70011 due to lack of any response from home server X port 1812

...was replaced, without a change in home server configuration, with:

Tue Nov 24 06:32:01 2009 : Error: PROXY: Marking home server X port 1812 as zombie (it looks like it is dead).
Tue Nov 24 06:32:03 2009 : Info: PROXY: Marking home server X port 1812 as dead.
Tue Nov 24 06:32:03 2009 : Error: PROXY: Marking home server Y port 1812 as zombie (it looks like it is dead).

Once this happened, I went to investigate, only to find out that our test
username requests were no longer summarily rejected by those two home
servers - instead they were discarded. So the marking those servers alive
would never happen, and this was the obvious root of the proxying problem.

It was unclear to me why didn't FreeRADIUS notice this as soon as it first
happened, and when it eventually happened, why didn't it explicate the
rationale. So I looked and found these in src/main/event.c:

        RDEBUG2("No response to status check %d from home server %s port %d",
        RDEBUG2("Proxying request %d to home server %s port %d",
        RDEBUG2("ERROR: Failed to find live home server for realm %s",
        RDEBUG2("Failed to find live home server for request %d", request->number);

It doesn't make sense for both error and debug messages to be displayed on
the same debug level. The error messages need to have priority, so that the
admin actually has a chance to see them.

In this particular situation, when I move from debug level 0 to 2 in order
to oversee these events, I get not only these messages, but gobs of rlm_sql
expansions, unlang processing logs, etc.

It would be better if some of those error messages were upgraded to L_ERR,
or L_PROXY, while keeping the truely informational messages as L_DBG.
In fact it looks like there's only a single reference to L_PROXY in the
entire file.

Does this make sense, can I submit patches?

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.