[Kea-users] Kea logging level

[Tomek Mrugalski]

On 07.03.2016 20:00, Thomas Andersen wrote:
> Hi Francis,
> 
> I do have several loggers, including the .packets :)
> 
> But no matter which logger i have tried using, I can only get the
> leases if I put it in DEBUG. And my concern with .leases, is that it
> seems “weird” that you get no entries when you log with INFO. Maybe
> it’s because i have a believe that no production systems should be in
> any kind of debug mode - although I’m aware that the system itself is
> not actual in debug mode but just logging debug messages. And I would
> also believe that almost everyone would be interested in the lease
> log per default in order to identify the mac address associated to an
> IP address.
Ack. You're not the first (not the second person) who complains about
that. I think we should update the logging, so essential information,
like lease being assigned, renewed or released should be logged by
default, or at least on info level.

Initially, one of the engineers had a concern that if the server logs
this type of information by default, it could be used as a DoS attack
vector. Which is true in principle. If someone floods your server with
packets and there's a lot of logging done as a result, this could be an
effective DoS if your logging system is not ready to handle that amount
of logs. But I think we went a bit overboard with this.

For me, it's similar to apache logging each http request by default.
This is what users are expecting. If you want to run a
million-visitors-a-day site, you're either supposed to have the hardware
beefy enough to handle those logs or tweak your server to generate less
logging. I believe the same principle should apply here.

Can you open up a ticket requesting change of the logging levels to info?

Thanks,
Tomek