[Freeipa-devel] automount in LDAP

[Rob Crittenden]

Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 10:10 -0500, Rob Crittenden wrote:
>> And this is what I meant by poor choices now affecting the future :-)
>>
>> Right now I'm sort of waving my hand saying 'location will be in the DN 
>> of the automount entry' but I don't yet say where I'm storing location 
>> other than in the DN. This will require the UI to fetch all the 
>> automount entries and sift thru the names to determine the list of 
>> locations to present to a user.
> 
> Is it necessary to store it in the DN ?
> Why can't we add it into the entry instead ?

Because all shares are rooted in the same place, auto_master. So we need 
a separate auto_master for each location. Our UI would be clever enough 
to look at another attribute but the autofs code isn't.

>> On the command-line it would be easier as we'd just pass along the 
>> location requested, though this would be prone to typos.
> 
> True, but it is not the end of the world if it is just an attribute.
> If it is part of the DN in a hierarchy of objects it is much more severe
> as we still do not have subtree renames with FDS.

I don't think that would be a problem. If they want to rename a location 
we'll just demand that they remove and re-create the maps for now. If we 
wanted to be super-user-friendly we could probably do this automatically 
but I think manually would be fine for starters.

>> We could live with this for now and in the future store location in some 
>> central point. It wouldn't affect the UI, just make the processing a bit 
>> less intensive.
> 
> I see the location for now just as a filter, if we put it as an
> additional attribute for the entry you don't need to show anything else
> but what is already there (and allow to add arbitrary new location
> strings)

Granted I'm not an expert at autofs but I don't think the client-side 
code works that way.

>> I'm thinking of just setting location as a cn in the DN, so a map DN 
>> would look like:
>>
>> dn: automountmapname=auto.direct, cn=Baltimore, cn=automount, 
>> dc=example, dc=com
>>
>> or
>>
>> dn: automountmapname=auto.direct, cn=default, cn=automount, dc=example, 
>> dc=com
>>
>> I should probably treat the location cn as case-sensitive since that is 
>> what the cn attribute defines.
> 
> IIRC the CN is case-insensitive, anyway I would really prefer not to
> embed the location in the DN also because, as I said in another mail, we
> may want to associate an automount map with multiple locations.

I think you'd have to duplicate the map for each location. If you have 
the same map everywhere then the argument for having separate locations 
becomes weaker, IMHO.

rob