Feature Request: more flexible logging facilities

[Luigi Lauro]

First of all I want to thank you for all the hard effort on this
wonderful DNS server.

I've been looking hard for a tinydns replacement, and, finally,
MaraDNS fits perfectly.

Right now I'm using dnscache as a non-threaded recursive local cache,
while using MaraDNS compiled authonly (i need IPV6 and several other
auth only features) as my only authoritative name server (alone with
zoneserver for zone transfers).

This is a perfect match, at least till your new non-threaded recursive
local cache is out, which I hope will give dnscache a real treat! :-)

Now let's get down to business: how to improve MaraDNS.

The only gripe I found so far is that I'm a logging/monitoring freak,
and I'm having really problems to implement a decent
logging/monitoring solution for MaraDNS, and the main reason is the
fact I cannot tell MaraDNS to log into a separate log file.

On FreeBSD everything gets into daemon.info, which is
/var/log/messages, and it's quite hard do split the MaraDNS lines from
the rest, and therefore is quite hard to implement a decent munin
monitoring plugin such as I had with tinydns (the wonderful
tinystats).

So what I'm asking and suggesting for is two different things:

A) A more flexible logging configuration (alternatives to syslog, for
example logging to a separate file, or at least being able to choose
the syslog facility and the ident name, so I can create a 'maradns'
and have it into a separate log file)
B) If possible, some statistics interface, so to be able to query
MaraDNS for statistical informations (how many queries requested, how
many for each RR type, % of query in errors, etc...)

This would allow me to have a comprehensive, dedicated MaraDNS log to
look at to check how MaraDNS is working and if everything is ok,
without having to look at a massive /var/log/messages. I know I can
easily do a grep out of that log, but having maradns logging to a
separate file from the start is a nice option I think, and it's in
99,9999% of the 'servers/daemons' out there for a reason. And, it's
quite ugly that the 'ident' given is the default full path, it would
be perfectly to be able to choose as I said both syslog facilities and
ident in case syslog logging is wanted.

Also, the stats interface would be wonderful to easily realise something as:

http://motoko.lapo.it/munin/lapo.it/motoko.lapo.it-tinydns.html
http://motoko.lapo.it/munin/lapo.it/motoko.lapo.it-tinydns_err.html

Currently, these two shortcomings are the only things that I would
love to have from the 'old' djb tinydns, which I used to run as my
only authoritative DNS.

I don't want to have reasons to look back, hence I'm suggesting these things.

Thank you for your patience and keep up the wonderful work,

-- 
Luigi Lauro