ProFTPD mini-HOWTO - ProFTPD Tracing

## ProFTPD Tracing

What is Tracing?
"Tracing" is a new form of logging, introduced in the 1.3.1 ProFTPD release series.

Trace logging has the concept of multiple logging channels, each of which has its own log level. Layers and APIs within the ProFTPD source will tend to use their own channels. There is no limit to the number of different log channels that can be supported.

Within a channel, the assumption is that lower log levels indicate higher priority or importance. Or to look at it another way, the higher the log level for channel, the more noisy that log channel might be. The lowest log level is 1; there is no upper log level limit.

Why have this new form of logging, in addition to all the other kinds of logs (e.g. `SystemLog`, `ExtendedLog`, etc) that a `proftpd` daemon can currently produce? The usual `SystemLog` of proftpd debug logging, at a high `DebugLevel`, was becoming unreadable; it is difficult to find the tidbits of knowledge amidst the other messages in that file. By separating log messages into channels and levels, tracing gives the administrator a much finer-grained control over the logging, given them a way of focusing the logging more narrowly, so only the area of code of interest is logged.

Support for tracing is enabled by default. Use the `--disable-trace` configure option, when compiling ProFTPD, to disable all tracing support. I recommend that high-traffic production sites, which have no need for debug logging at this granularity, use the `--disable-trace` option.

Configuration Directives
There are two new configuration directives for tracing: `TraceLog` and `Trace`. Note that for tracing to be effective, these two directives, if used, must appear at the start of your `proftpd.conf` file, before any other directives.

The `TraceLog` directive specifies a filename to which to write the tracing log messages. For example:

      TraceLog /var/ftpd/trace.log

Without this directive, no trace logging will occur.

Once you have configured your `TraceLog`, you will use the `Trace` directive to control the verbosity of that log:

      Trace channel1:level1 channel2:level2 ...

This directive lets you set each log channel and its level differently, e.g.:

      Trace command:5 response:8 timer:2 config:9

There is also support for a special "ALL" keyword:

      Trace ALL:10

The following is the list of channels which are covered by the "ALL" keyword:

- auth
- binding
- command
- config
- ctrls
- data
- delay
- dns
- dso
- event
- facl
- fsio
- ident
- inet
- l10n
- lock
- netacl
- netio
- pam
- pool
- regexp
- response
- site
- timer
- utf8
- var

This means that if you use the following in your `proftpd.conf` file, at the very top:

      TraceLog /path/to/ftpd/trace.log
      Trace ALL:10

Then all of the above channels, up to log level 10, will have their messages logged. Any custom channels, such as those used by modules, are not covered by the "ALL" keyword. For example, the `mod_tls` module may log to a "tls" channel. Any messages to that "tls" channel would not appear in the Trace log file, using the above configuration. Instead, you would need to explicitly mention the "tls" channel, i.e.:

      TraceLog /path/to/ftpd/trace.log
      Trace ALL:10 tls:10

Trace Log Format
Every log message in a `TraceLog` uses the following format:

      timestamp [process ID] <channel:level>: message

For example:

      Jan 16 17:15:58 [30583] <auth:6>: dispatching auth request "endgrent" to module mod_auth_unix

This shows process ID 30583 logging to the "auth" channel, log level 6, a message about handling the "endgrent" Auth API request.

Runtime Tracing
If Controls support is enabled in your `proftpd`, and you are using the `mod_ctrls_admin` module, then you can also use the `ftpdctl` command to adjust the trace logging settings in the running `proftpd`, without needing to change your `proftpd.conf` file. See:

      doc/modules/mod_ctrls_admin.html#trace

for more information.

Use Only When Needed
Remember that tracing is a verbose (and thus expensive) form of logging, and thus makes the `proftpd` daemon run slower. Tracing should only ever be used for debugging and development purposes; once your `proftpd` is up and running the way you need, you should remove all `Trace` and `TraceLog` directives from your `proftpd.conf`.

$Date: 2007/05/24 17:17:42 $