FC2 and general LDAP Support

[Karl DeBisschop]

On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 10:12, Roland Käser wrote:
> Look at the mail from Nicolas Mailhot. This is one of my points. Now, we 
> have all the configuration stuff spread over a lot of configuration 
> files. This structure is matured since the first version of Unix. But to 
> maintain all this files become more worse over the time. Yet the KDE 
> comes with a lot of new configuration files so on with every other 
> application on the whole system. The redmond bill hat not that many good 
> ideas but the one with the registry was a good one.

I could not disagree more. In my experience, the registry is a
convoluted mess and a horrible single point of failure. It is so complex
that if it gets screwed up, the general solution is to "reinstall
windows"

I'll give an example in contrast. On one of my installs of FC1, I
noticed a periodic disk seek, and saw error in my log (It has since been
found out that this was an up2date client from rh9 failing, but I had
the problem before the issue surfaced on the mailing lists). In this
case, I notice that the problem did not occur when my wife logged in,
nor did it occur when I logged in via ssh). So I deleted my .gnome
directory, logged in again, and all was fine. No reinstalls, not even of
gnome - the total cost - 5 minutes to reconfigure my gnome preferences.

I cannot imagine finding the fix so easily on a w2k registry, and I have
no wish to see that concept brought into the linux world.

LDAP has it's place. I use it and like it here at work. But I do not see
creating a linux registry as a good thing.

>  If we wanna make 
> linux become a more professional operating system and feels in a more 
> homogeneous way. We need to replace all this fragments of configuration 
> spread nearly over the whole file system by an more professional way of 
> an configuration concept.

The Linux FHS does not spread configuration files all over the place. It
vary clearly puts all global configuration files in /etc, and personal
configuration file in the user's home directory. I think X11 is the only
app which once got a historical exception, and those are in /etc on
fedora too.

>  It doesn't needs all to be changed by the next 
> fedora release but I strongly think that to store all the configuration 
> settings inside a centralized configuration store would  anymore 
> enhance the release.  And nicolas has right; if we are the first ones 
> who forces this concept it probably becomes a standard in the linux 
> distributions.
> And for an other benefit, think about the possibilities of hanging a 
> centrailized configuration store for all workstations an servers on big 
> network. All the workstation configurations are stored in one single 
> place (with backup servers of corse) and needs only to be maintaind at 
> this place.

I fully support the idea of making this an option, but I question its
value to the home user. I will also point out that I do the same thing
with CVS already. It works today, all you need to do is CVS the files
that have changed from what is in the original RPM.

>  I can imagine the next TCO studies from all the business 
> analysts for comparing windows with linux. The TCO of linux whould come 
> extremly down by using a such concept.

Again, this is a benefit in the enterprise, but could be a burden in the
home.

> Was that enough arguments for establishing a ldap server for the user 
> records.

Sorry, in my mind it was not.

-- 
Karl DeBisschop <kdebisschop at alert.infoplease.com>
Pearson Education/Information Please