[Freeipa-devel] Design discussion: autofs integration

[Jakub Hrozek]

On Fri, Dec 09, 2011 at 08:01:44AM +0800, Ian Kent wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-12-08 at 17:52 +0100, Jakub Hrozek wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have created a wiki page summarizing my design proposal on integrating
> > SSSD with automounter:
> > https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/wiki/DesignDocs/AutofsIntegration
> > 
> > Feedback is much appreciated - a reply to this email would probably work
> > best. The target of this work is 1.8
> 
> Thanks for writing this summary, it's excellent.
> There's not much I have to say about it because it is already quite
> thorough.
> 
> One thing I dislike about the discussion, and while I let it pass in
> bugs and mailing list discussions, I think it is wrong to put it in
> public design documents. The statement "autofs abuses the nsswitch.conf
> configuration file" I find a little offensive. autofs uses that
> configuration file and parses only the "automount" entry using the same
> semantic behavior as nss, so the word "abuse" is wrong and a little rude
> IMHO.

I'm sorry -- I didn't mean to offend you and perhaps abuse was a strong
word. I've changed the design docs.

That said, I'm still not convinced that it is a good idea to use another
application's config file.

My main concern is that users often mistakenly think that there is a
standard glibc interface defined. Also, when the shared config file
changes (not that it's likely that nsswitch would change drastically),
you're in trouble -- for instance, sudo suffered recently when Fedora
changed from using ldap.conf to nslcd.conf

> 
> In the section "The LDAP schema used by autofs" which talks about schema
> it is probably worth mentioning the difficulty with the cn attribute
> being case insensitive. That introduces problems because key names
> (essentially directory names) are case sensitive and I believe that is
> the main reason RFC2307bis (as it relates to autofs) was adopted.
> 

Good point, I've included that in the design page.