Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 07:20:15 +0100 From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: cskinner@bml.ca (Chris K. Skinner), csdayton@midway.uchicago.edu, doc@FreeBSD.ORG, support@cdrom.com Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 Documentation and Installation of "Everything" to 2.1 Gig drive. Message-ID: <27014.832918815@palmer.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 23 May 1996 14:19:57 PDT." <2944.832886397@time.cdrom.com>
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"Jordan K. Hubbard" wrote in message ID <2944.832886397@time.cdrom.com>: > See dialog(1) - it lets you write some fairly nice looking shell > scripts for doing exactly this kind of thing. Just don't, whatever you do, try to use libdialog (the library version of the dialog program for use in other programs). You'll bash your head against it for long hours and then want to commit mass murder (or go for another pizza, depending on your personality). > Once you have your DNS auto-configuration script working, send it to > me and we'll find a way to use it in the global setup tool Gary's > writing. :-) Some things I'm not 100% happy about. True, I have been (and am still) working on a configuration ``manager'' (editor would probably be a better description). My reservations come from some of your ideas. Setting up a simple DNS (e.g. for the private net 10) is a relatively simple process. You don't have to worry about (on the most part) MX records, whether that should be a CNAME or an A record, and so on. Setting up a secondary server could equally be easily implimented. Setting up a primary server should (in my opinion) be limited to the same sort of functionality as a secondary setup (i.e. not actually editing the zone files, just the named.boot file). Zone files are nasty beasts, and anyone who is running an Internet zone should probably either have the O'Reilly book and read it, or be named ``Paul Vixie'' and be lucky enough to write the DNS software. Some other parts of the system are equally nasty (sendmail.cf spring to mind immediately). A basic editor for the M4 sendmail configuration macros could probably be easily written, but don't ask me to write something which hand-holds you through defining re-writing rules, nor which rule set to put them into! I would say about 80% of the config files in /etc could be ``managed'' to some extent, the rest are too advanced for this type of hand-holding, especially in a voluntary project (a lot of the files are not designed with machine editing in mind :-( ) > > Config template A is a setup for simple 5 node LAN > > with tcp/ip. Config template B is for an internet > > connection on ethernet where the machine being > > configured is the name server for a small domain. > See above. :-) Yes, I daresay that a good 90% of what's in /etc could > be spat out by editors using template files from /usr/share/misc, or > something. It's even been talked about a fair bit. It's just that > pesky problem of finding enough bodies which continues to confound us > up to now.. :-) It strikes me there are TWO programs needed here. One for a freshly installed system, and one to re-configure an existing system. The fresh-install program just asks a series of basic questions (e.g. ``Is this a dedicated server or a client''. If server, ``Do you want to run DNS?''. If client ``What is your domain name? What is your DNS servers IP address?'' and so on). It would be relatively easy to figure out a question tree which would end up with a system which is (for the most part) configured correctly, and the user wouldn't have to touch a thing. The re-configuration program is what I've got a skeleton for at the minute (I have most of the back-end to frond-end/UI glue done, just the actual `meat' of the program to write now. A lot of it will be ``relatively'' simple, just time consuming to do well). It could be (optionally) invoked once the fresh-install program is done to allow the user to make those little tweaks that professional/power users always like to make. See where the division lies, and how that makes the system more adaptable? If you want to change your DNS, you don't want to have to go through the entire config process again... Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info
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