Binary log format

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

So, thinking along the lines of a binary log format for StatsLog, to avoid the 
syslog overhead, the first obvious idea was to just dump timestamped BER 
messages into a logfile, and have a separate postprocessor command produce 
human readable text.

Thinking further about this, we could just dump PCAP format - and use tcpdump, 
WireShark, or whatever favorite tool to render the log. If all we want is a 
timestamped log of messages that slapd has processed, we can do that right now 
and won't have to invest any effort at all into postprocessors.

That still leaves a question of what to do with Debug messages that also go to 
syslog - it's easier to identify problems if the error message appears 
somewhere close to the log of the original request. So we'd need a tool to 
interleave these in order, if we had to pull messages both from the binary log 
and from syslog. Or, we could define a new custom packet type for these 
Debug/diagnostic messages, and just spit them out into the PCAP file too. This 
might require us to write a custom parser plugin for WireShark or whatever, to 
render these messages. That's still not a big deal, compared to inventing our 
own entire log postprocessing framework.

Thoughts, suggestions?

--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/