FC2 and general LDAP Support

[NakedChimp]

On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 16:10, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 16:12, Roland Käser wrote:
> > The redmond bill hat not that many good 
> > ideas but the one with the registry was a good one.
> 
> I couldn't disagree more. The Windoze registry is a pseudo-monolithic
> piece of binary information that can't be easily edited, backed up or
> manually edited in case of corruption or failure. Even GNOME's approach
> with GConf is still a mess (have you ever tried looking for a config
> element inside the XML files?)
> 

Just had to throw in my two cents.

First off, yes, I am an "Windoze" administrator for a company with about
50000 workstations and 3000 servers.  I have also been using various
Linux distributions exclusively at home since early '95 and pimp them
every chance I get.  I realize that I am not an guru with Linux (and
have never used it outside a personal workstation or a Web/File/whatever
server), but I do feel I am more then qualified to discuss the Windows
Registry.

Second off, the Registry _can_ be easily edited and backed up.  There
are numerous tools, some provided by Microsoft themselves, which give
you this capability.  If I need to make a change to an app I can create
a .REG file for a user with _very_ little work and have them import it
on their machine simply by double clicking on it.  App changed with no
scripting or having the user edit a file.  Various scripting languages,
such as Perl, WinBatch and VBScript have also extended what the tools
offer to give you even more power.  How do I know this?  Because in a
matter of a minute I can sit down and write a script that will go out
and change any key in the registry I need to.  I have also written Perl
scripts that contain about 1000 lines which farm information from the
registry and give me better Hardware/Software Inventory then what I get
from Third party tools.  I didn't have to go through various files,
parsing the information out from various different formats to get this
information.  As far as backup goes, Windows has shipped with a method
of backing up the Registry for as long as I can remember.  The users
even have their own Registry file that stores their configuration which
can be backed up and restored easily.  On the point about fixing
corruption however you are dead on, which has been an issue in the past,
but I have yet to see a corrupt registry with Win2K and above OS's (not
that it cant happen, I just haven't seen it).  As far as failure goes,
it all depends on what you mean.  If you mean the OS just fails to boot
up because someone misconfigured the Registry, then this is wrong as I
have dozens of times taken a registry file from one machine and loaded
it on another, made the change and put it back on the original machine.

In my opinion as an administrator for a large environment, GConf is a
blessing.  Some people may not like it, but it beats the pants off of
any other configuration method I have seen out there, and I for one am
glad that Havoc brought it to fruition.  I am eagerly awaiting the day
that I can have GConf use a DB or LDAP instead of just the filesystem,
that way I can configure all the settings in one central location, like
Microsoft's Active Directory or Novell's Directory Services.

Dislike windows if you will, but don't bash things about it that you
have very little idea on how they work.  And please don't ignore things
out there because you perceive them to be junk.  Microsoft isn't the
greatest company out there, but they do have some amazingly smart people
working for them who have come up with some very good products and ways
of doing things.

> I don't mind Linux having a lot of configuration files. What I would
> like to see is a configuration tool that knows about those files, knows
> how to modify them and allows the user to do those changes through a
> streamlined, homogeneous user interface.
> 

I have nothing against configurations files.  However, from an
administrators standpoint, if I have to do something that cannot simply
be done by a GUI interface it is a waste of my time to shuffle through
each configuration file figuring out each all of their unique nuances. 
I would much rather prefer something predictable and more customizable. 
For Example, if I'm going to want to change the settings for an
application AppA, I am not going to want to dig through a dot file and
figure out the format that this should be put in.  Some files require
items in a specific order.  In some files "#" is a comment while in
others a ";" is a comment.  I would much rather say, "here is the key
that I need changed, and this is the value I need it changed to" and be
done with it.  What if the app was installed in a different location? 
Then I have to hunt for it.  What If I need to allow the user to change
a value, but I don't want them to be able to change every value?  In a
Registry like system I can lock this down as far as I need it.  In a
configuration file I need to give the user access to the whole thing (we
will leave out discussions of the future of ReiserFS at this point). 
There are certain things that cannot be easily solved by configuration
files and GUI front ends, and I think this is something that seriously
needs to be taken look at.

> 
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