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This section points out some message logging and tracking techniques.
Snapshots of message traffic, and information on TCP/IP connections handled by the PMDF Service Dispatcher, are also available.
28.4.3.1 Logging Messages Passing through PMDF
The logging channel keyword causes PMDF write a log file
entry for each pass of a message through a PMDF channel; see
Section 2.3.4.84 for details. The LOG_CONNECTION PMDF option
can be used to cause PMDF to log TCP/IP connections, such as SMTP, POP,
and IMAP connections; such connection entries can either be included in
the regular PMDF message log file, or written to a separate file. See
Section 7.3.6 for discussion of the LOG_CONNECTION and
SEPARATE_CONNECTION_LOG options. Note that with logging
turned on, the cumulative mail.log file in the PMDF log
directory will continue to grow and grow; PMDF itself never does
anything with this log file and it is up to you to periodically write
it to backup and delete it, or truncate it, or whatever your site
prefers; the same is true for the connection.log file if
TCP/IP connections are logged separately. Section 31.1.1 has a further
discussion of managing the PMDF log files.
In addition to the base set of data logged when the
logging keyword is used, there are options to cause the
log output to include additional details, as discussed in
Section 28.4.3.1.1 below.
28.4.3.1.1 Extra Logging Detail
In addition to the base set of logging enabled via the
logging channel keyword, PMDF has options that cause
additional information to be included in the entries written to the
mail.log* files. Note that logging such additional
information tends to incur additional overhead.
In particular, setting LOG_MESSAGE_ID=1,
LOG_CONNECTION=7, and LOG_FILENAME=1 in your
PMDF option file can be of interest on a PMDF e-mail firewall. Logging
the message ID makes it easier to find entries in the log file
corresponding to a particular message, or to correlate different
entries in the log file corresponding to a single message. Logging the
SMTP client connection information can be useful to show just what
system really sent the message to your PMDF firewall. Logging the
process id also logs the thread id in the case of multithreaded
channels; while the process ids themselves normally will be rather
monotonous on a PMDF firewall system, being that of a Dispatcher Worker
Process (for SMTP messages received) or a PMDF Process Symbiont process
(for SMTP messages sent), having the process id and thread id logged is
quite useful for correlating message entries with connection entries.
Logging the filename can be useful if you want to correlate log file
entries with actual message files currently in the PMDF queue area.
Setting LOG_HEADER=1 can be of interest if you want to
save certain message headers to the mail.log* files.
Additionally, setting LOG_USERNAME=1 on a PMDF firewall
system ought generally to result in fairly monotonous extra information
being logged, as the username would normally just be the username of
the user who last started the PMDF Service Dispatcher. Enable this
options if you want to confirm that the username of processes enqueuing
messages are as expected.
See Section 7.3.6 for more details on such logging options.
28.4.3.2 Snapshots of Message Traffic through PMDF
PMDF maintains channel counters based on the Mail Monitoring MIB, RFC
1566. These counters can provide "snapshots" of the state of
the PMDF queues and a feel for the volume of messages passing through
PMDF. See Chapter 31 for details.
28.4.3.3 Monitoring TCP/IP Connections to the Dispatcher
The PMDF Service Dispatcher maintains statistics on connections it
handles, e.g., the number of recent SMTP connections and the
hosts from which the connections were made. See Section 11.7 for
details.
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