Making a dynamically-linked root

[Matthew Dillon]

    It would be fairly easy to create a unix-domain or localhost socketed
    port service and messaging primitives to access just about any
    configuration data that you would typically store in a file.  Initially
    such a service would simply access the appropriate file and relay the
    information to the client but ultimately it could incorporate more
    sophisticated features on its backend without any modifications having 
    to be done on the client side or to the client protocol.  Something like
    this:

    * client connects to sevice

    * client sends message with creds (SCM_CREDS) containing request.  The
    message would include a serial id to allow the client side to
    multi-thread or stream requests, configuration file id or path name,
    command, and data.

    * client gets reply (and optionally caches result, default to off).
    (done)

    Frontend primitives could be as simple as 'get record N', and
    'lookup record with key', plus a timeout/failure and possibly
    a failsafe feature.  The entire implementation in libc would be very
    small and record data would always be returned in text form (key/data)
    for maximum portability. 

    Backend sophisitication could include loadable modules to integrate
    remote services for particular configuration file classes, like NIS,
    multiple resolver sources, logging/auditing, security restrictions,
    different backend storage mechanisms such as databases, backend forking
    and/or multi-threading to handle parallel blockable requests (e.g. DNS 
    lookups), automatic DBM management (no need to run pwd_mkdb and friends),
    security partitioning (fork/jail) to prevent bugs from corrupting other
    users using the service, and so forth.

    It would be nice to be able to get rid of the necessity of running all
    the *_mkdb commands and to remove PAM, locale, and the resolver from
    client binaries, and to have a mechanism that anyone can write a simple
    DLL to support their own special circumstances.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>


:I think that would be quite neat; as discussed, irs from the BIND
:distribution does the DNS elements of this, although not in our current
:framework.  An idea I've also been interested in looking at, now that we
:have NSS to indirect many of the database operations, is how easy it would
:be to indirect new configuration data through NSS.  For example, although
:we can share account information via directory services such as NIS, LDAP,
:etc, we cannot currently share login.conf user class data.  Some other
:configuration files might also lend themselves quite well to this sort of
:configuration -- perhaps even files such as inetd.conf, ftpusers,
:login.access, opiekies, etc.
:
:One of the important goals of elements like NSS is to improve our ability
:to centrally manage many FreeBSD systems in a scalable manner; another is
:the ability to support more reliable and more easily managed backends,
:such as configuration databases originating in local SQL, etc. 
:Experimenting with ways to take this a few steps further might be quite
:interesting, and could have some nice payoffs.
:
:Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
:robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories