dovecot - Aug 2006 - alternate rawlog directory

Hello,

In rc2 sources, the rawlog directory seem to be hard-coded to be
looked for in $HOME.

I'd like to have a way to centralized the place where rawlog files are, in
order to be able :

  . to rotate them more easily
  . not to leave them at the user's reach
  . not to have to enter the user's directory to read them

I'd like to have a layout similar to this :

  /var/log/dovecot.rawlog/
			 /user1/20060708-093811-45581.in
			 /user1/20060708-093811-45581.ou
			 /user1/...
			 /user2/20060708-093811-45590.in
			 /user2/20060708-093811-45590.out

What do you think about that idea ?  

Is there already a patch to do that, should I change rawlog.c or is
ther already a regular way do do that ?

Thanks

-- 
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | P?le informatique - syst?mes et r?seau

On 3/08/2006 12:16 a.m., Thomas Hummel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> In rc2 sources, the rawlog directory seem to be hard-coded to be
> looked for in $HOME.
> 
> I'd like to have a way to centralized the place where rawlog files are,
in order to be able :
> 
>   . to rotate them more easily
>   . not to leave them at the user's reach
>   . not to have to enter the user's directory to read them
> 
> I'd like to have a layout similar to this :
> 
>   /var/log/dovecot.rawlog/
> 			 /user1/20060708-093811-45581.in
> 			 /user1/20060708-093811-45581.ou
> 			 /user1/...
> 			 /user2/20060708-093811-45590.in
> 			 /user2/20060708-093811-45590.out
> 
> What do you think about that idea ?  
These files are really only useful for debugging and tracing purposes, and 
Dovecot does not need them to operate.  Do you need these files for a particular
purpose?

Quite likely it'll just send your disk IO load through the roof, and degrade
the
performance of everyone trying to use your server.  In other words, maybe not 
something you'd want turned on on a production server or one which you want 
reasonable performance out of.  To have to deal with rotation suggests you want 
to leave this feature on for days on end, if not permanently.

OTOH what *may* be handy for debugging (and maybe for you) is the ability to 
selectively run rawlog for a specific username(s).  That way it wouldn't
matter
much where the logs are kept as there would only be a single place (the 
specified users' home directory) where logs are actually generated.

Ditto with gdbhelper, which I think would be even more useful by being able to 
specify where the core files are dumped (although to be fair I haven't had a
single crash or corefile from dovecot for months now).  I changed the path in 
mine by hand but that's a bit of a hack.

Probably a bit late for 1.0 final, but would be potentially useful going 
forward............

Reuben