Marc and Dean described, as I have some free time on my hands. So far as the latter problem is concerned, I wrote the patch to keep pulling data and discard it. In this patch, I have set it up to log failures in the access log as well as in the error log.
Comments are welcome, as always.
This is only lightly tested, though it does appear to work fine. Unfortunately, I'm swamped right now. Perhaps next year. Although there's an obvious bug.