Re: System administration tool

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Sat, 10 Apr 1999, George Farris wrote:
> 
> I would really like to see support for LDAP in some of the system 
> admin tools.  I hope people will keep this in mind.  I know it's a 
> little off to the side of this discussion but I thought I'd throw 
> in my $0.02 worth.
> 

Read Wichert's proposal; there is really no reason to worry about what
database is used for the backend. Wichert's setup would let users choose
different backends for different parts of the configuration namespace.
If they want to use Oracle, they can. If they want to use a text file,
they can. LDAP too.

The key issue is really the interface used to communicate with the
configuration namespace (set values for names, query names, get
notification when names change). Then you can use different backends to
store the name/value pairs, and different frontends to talk to the
configuration engine. But you need to have a common interface with a fixed
set of capabilities, so people can write apps that use the engine. The
main decisions are 1) what capabilities the engine will have and 2) how
communication with the engine takes place. Decision 2) has two components, 
communication channel (pipes, sockets, CORBA) and communication encoding
(XML, custom language, an IDL spec).

There would probably be a small server program with pluggable database
backends on the engine side, and a small C library for talking to the
server on the client side. But these are implementation details.

Havoc