Segfaulting with rlm_perl

[Norman Elton]

I'm beginning the process of replacing a home-grown RADIUS server with
freeradius, a good idea on many many fronts. The server will interact
with our backend databases in order to determine attributes to inject
into the access-accept messages. For initial development, I've begun
work on a perl script that is interacting with freeradius 2.1.10. I'm
a little alarmed that a malfunctioning perl script can segfault the
entire server. I was hoping that freeradius could compartmentalize a
failing script, restarting it as necessary.

Admittedly, during development, my scripts are not production-ready,
and there are lots of safety checks that simply aren't there. But I'm
worried that, going into production, we'll discover an unexpected
corner-case that crashes our entire radius infrastructure (not a good
thing).

Is the best practice simply to make sure you're scripts are
bullet-proof? Or is there a more stable method of interacting with an
external resource? I chosen rlm_perl because the script didn't need to
be instantiated every time (as with rlm_exec), but perhaps we'd be
better off relying on rlm_exec if it is more tolerant of corner-case
failures.

Thanks,

Norman