alt Hacker NewsI think it's difficult to say without knowing how the system is deployed and administered. "If a SMTP mailer trying to send email to somewhere logs 'cannot contact port 25 on <remote host>', that is not an error in the local system"
Maybe or maybe not. If the connection problem is really due to the remote host then that's not the problem of the sender. But maybe the local network interface is down, maybe there's a local firewall rule blocking it,...
If you know the deployment scenario then you can make reasonable decisions on logging levels but quite often code is generic and can be deployed in multiple configurations so that's hard to do
Replies
> But maybe the local network interface is down, maybe there's a local firewall rule blocking it,...
That's exactly why you log it as a warning. People get warned all the time about the dangers of smoking. It's important that people be warned about smoking; these warnings save lives. People should pay attention to warnings, which let them know about worrisome concerns that should be heeded. But guess what? Everyone has a story about someone who smoked until they were 90 and died in a car accident. It is not an error that somebody is smoking. Other systems will make their own bloody decisions and firewalling you off might be one of them. That is normal.
What do you think a warning means?
How about this:
- An error is an event that someone should act on. Not necessarily you. But if it's not an event that ever needs the attention of a person then the severity is less than an error.
Examples: Invalid credentials. HTTP 404 - Not Found, HTTP 403 Forbidden, (all of the HTTP 400s, by definition)
It's not my problem as a site owner if one of my users entered the wrong URL or typed their password wrong, but it's somebody's problem.
A warning is something that A) a person would likely want to know and B) wouldn't necessarily need to act on
INFO is for something a person would likely want to know and unlikely needs action
DEBUG is for something likely to be helpful
TRACE is for just about anything that happens
EMERG/CRIT are for significant errors of immediate impact
PANIC the sky is falling, I hope you have good running shoes
The point is that if your program itself take note of the error from the library it is ok. You, as the program owner, can decide what to do with it (error log or not).
But if you are the SMTP library and that you unilaterally log that as an error. That is an issue.