Flood of client log entries on all clients when some clients cannot receive their proxy key

[Bill Foster]

We are preparing to deploy UFTP using a large number of clients. We are making use of the response proxy architecture (Figure 4 in proxy_usage.txt). We anticipate that the client logging will be nearly unusable and detrimental to its host computer at its default level (level 2). This is due to some of our clients that request a key are unable to receive the multicasted key from the response proxy. (This is due to a network configuration issue at a minority of our sites that is variable and that we need to live with. We know that these sites will not be able to receive a multicast.) With logging at level 2 all of the clients listening on the multicast address are logging each broadcast of the key (e.g. "2018/04/23 17:03:19.983272: Received PROXY_KEY from…"). In our case these retries are coming at a rate of at least 40 per second and filling our 2MB log files every 13 minutes. Of course this only happens when there are clients that cannot receive a key but this is something that we cannot totally avoid. With the large number of clients we will deploy and the testing we have done so far we feel that this will inevitably happen.

We can fix this problem by dropping to level 1 logging but then we lose the valuable history of successful interactions of the client, server and proxy. In the event we really need this data to troubleshoot an issue we will be retrieving and sorting through many megabytes of unhelpful text to get the information we need.

Can you provide a way to exclude the key broadcast messages from the level 2 logging?

[Dennis Bush]

Bill,

You can modify the logging level of this message in the code. In line 749 of client_common.c, you'll find the log statement in question:

log2(0, 0, 0, "Received PROXY_KEY from %s", addrname);

Change the function call from log2 to log3, then recompile. That will cause the message to be printed at only level 3 or higher.

Regards,
Dennis

[Bill Foster]

Thanks Dennis,
Up to this point we have been using your prebuilt Windows executables. We will consider building it ourselves and use your instructions.

Best Regards,
Bill

[Bill Foster]

Hi Dennis,
Just to follow up. I was able to create a clean build of the client rather quickly so we are opting for using your recommendation. Thanks for the help!

For those stepping out in this direction, I have a MSDN license so I installed Visual Studio Enterprise 2015. I made sure I selected the C++ language during the install process. I used the guidance in the UFTP "ReadMe.txt" document provided with the source code for the syntax to initiate the build. I found this web page to be helpful in quickly getting to building the client: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/building-on-the-command-line. I used the "Developer Command Prompt" to navigate to the project folder and build the executable. On my Windows 7 Enterprise computer I did not have to specify an OPENSSL location, allowing the default to be used. Since we are installing on Windows 7 and up I did not use the WINXP flag. I did not use the NO_ENCRYPTION option either.

Best Regards,
Bill