Re: gconfd, multiple concurrent logins, orbit, pain

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

seth vidal <skvidal phy duke edu> writes: 
> Sounds ok to me. Stipulations on the server side could/should be:
>  ssl/tls encryption
>  no-X11/gtk/glib etc etc required to run it
>  some sort of well-known-file-type backend (ie: dbm, sql, ldap or
> something - but something I can sift the information out of with normal
> tools if shit hits the fan) also something I can easily backup. - ldap
> might be a good option here.
>  coordination with the kde-folks so that they use something similar (or
> ideally the same server)
>  coordination with the ximian folks so that evo sticks its config
> information in the same place.

All good stuff.

How would you do authentication? (From a user login to this server?)

Is it OK to require that all users have an account on the server
(perhaps with no login shell)? Certainly the server has to have some
concept of users (or all users could see each other's data going by),
so if it doesn't use the system user database we'd need some
server-specific one right?
 
> yeah, you did mention it before. glad I could act as memory for you
> :)

I am notoriously terrible about forgetting what I'm doing. ;-)

> There are a lot of things that may work well on a smallish 4-10 system
> level but right now I've got 80-100ish linux workstations and the number
> doesn't seem like its going down. There are a lot of things in gnome
> that could be nicer for doing things on a network like this for more
> centralized control over configuration options but distributed
> installation of software.

I'm very interested in addressing this problem, so I'm glad to get
feedback. If you ever get bored and want to list some suggestions in
more detail I'd love to see it. (So far, I've focused on sharing user
preferences among machines, but there's other kinds of state...)

Havoc