Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 08:51:58 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: benedict@echonyc.com (Snob Art Genre) Cc: rb@gid.co.uk, mike@smith.net.au, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Discussion : Using DHCP to obtain configuration. Message-ID: <199804180851.BAA09527@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980417154353.17293D-100000@echonyc.com> from "Snob Art Genre" at Apr 17, 98 03:45:16 pm
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> > ...this option would introduce yet another chunk of mechanism which has to > > be working before one's system will DTRT. > > Yes! Has anyone here ever tried to fix a NeXTStep box when NetInfo was > spammed? It's not pretty, I assure you. vi. niload. This assumes you Do The Wrong Thing and maintain parallel text files. Another question: Has anyone tried to change a system configuration parameter (like an IP address or the machine name) and had it "just work" without having to go kill -1 and/or kill -9 & restart half the world? Consider the case of us doing the DHCP client thing (for which this threads subject was invented). Now say the server says "no, you can't have your lease back" (maybe we have been in suspend mode for 5 days, or the network has been renumbered out from under us, and the server was transparently proxying our old address on behalf of the inability of the DHCP protocol designers to forsee the need for a "REVOKE DHCP LEASE" and a client requirement to listen for it on the wire). For whatever reason, it wants us to have a different IP address. How would you make this work without a single configuration point that could notify interested parties of changes? (for example, via an ACAP or LDAP async server notification, a poll event, or whatever). If you allow idiots to use config files rather than a single, central get/put type API, you will *inevitably* end up with a "fetchmail"-type program that has a .fmrc with a stale hostname squirreled away somewhere. Or worse. On SVR4, there are five (*five*!) locations where you have to change the hostname. I'm sure that I could, if pressed, find duplications in FreeBSD's config files as well. The system-wide shell startup defined environment variables are an example of a name/value pair by administrative fiat. All we are talking about here is extending the fiat to access mechanism, which isn't a bad thing. I'm positive that a bidirectional data converter could be written (I've written one for all of the RFC2307 POSIX NIS schema data, in fact). You would still be free to open yourself up to the NeXTStep niload/nidump synchronization problems, if you really wanted the headache back in trade for being able to access flat files. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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