1444972 - RFE: please add a feature at the page: about:networking to extend to add logging to 'syslog / rsyslog' type network socket facility and level

Status: NEW

(Core :: XPCOM, enhancement, P5)

Description

[R P Herrold]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20180124150058

Steps to reproduce:

intial Subject: RFE: please add a feature at the page: about:networking to extend to add logging to 'syslog / rsyslog' type network (domain) socket facility and level

This is a request for enhancement

There is presently a (well deserved) warning about logging to a file, about unbridled file growth

Unix solves this by using network (and domain) sockets to well-formatted hand logging content off to a daemon, which is configurable.  

The 'severity' level, and the 'facility' it relates to are mature and well defined.  see:  man 1 logger for more detail


Actual results:

The present implementation permits a non-privileged user to 'fill up /tmp/' which is usually world writable, and if they did not understand the import of the warning, not have a clue how to revert the change

This is an obvious self DOS problem, and in a shared environment, more dangerous, as the userid is not mandatorily appended to the file generated, to permit 'tracking down' where the problem really came from



Expected results:

Use well known, and readily diagnosable 'syslog' type logging

'Sensible defaults' for Level and Facility may be pre-set, but amendable by a drop-box selection mechanism.  I would suggest 'info' from the well know options of:

       Valid level names are:

              emerg
              alert
              crit
              err
              warning
              notice
              info
              debug
              panic     deprecated synonym for emerg
              error     deprecated synonym for err
              warn      deprecated synonym for warning

===========

As to facility, I suggest the 'local' series be preferred

              local0
                to
              local7
plus:
              user

and so: local0


Separately, deprecating static file based logging after a transition interval, seems proper

Comment 1

[R P Herrold]

previous work at:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=273241

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580518

sort of is around this topic, but does not squarely address it

Comment 2

[Nathan Froyd [:froydnj]]

This is an interesting idea, but I don't seen us implementing this anytime soon; logging happens on non-Linux platforms as well, for one, so we can't use syslog everywhere.  And even on Linux/OSX, I think we'd retain the file-based logging, as I suspect the number of people who want to use syslog instead would be small.  So it's not clear to me what set of people this feature would benefit.