Samba management

[James Peach]

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 13:04 +0530, Chetan S wrote:
> On 6/8/06, Gerald (Jerry) Carter <jerry at samba.org> wrote:
> 
> > I would definitely support this effort.  I've wanted it for a while.
> > My preference, rather than to backport libnet code from Samba 4,
> > is to provide an API in stable library that is a thin layer wrapped
> > around the underlying rpc_client infrastructure.  That way we could
> > start using the IDL from Samba 4 in the future without breaking
> > existing applications.  This allows us to (a) get a working library
> > out there faster using the existing Samba 3 releases as a vehicle,
> > and (b) gives us a path to migrate to the improved RPC support
> > developed in Samba 4.  I also think that porting the Samba 4
> > IDL should be considered part of this project.
> >
> > We already have the beginnings of this in the libmsrpc.so library
> > in SAMBA_3_0.  I think it is important to make this RPC interface
> > available to other applications besides Samba (e.g. Mono) as soon
> > as possible.
> 
> 
> > Some of the management features you outline don't have a direct
> > mapping to existing RPC pipes so we need to think about what to
> > do with those.
> 
> Following up the "thin wrapper api" idea a bit more - is msrpc the
> ideal place for such abstraction or some other code-subtree common to
> Samba3 and 4  ?
> 
> The thin wrapper idea is appealing since it can connect to newer and
> newer api thrown up as part of Samba3/4.
> 
> Case in point :  James mentioned the need for the performance
> monitoring api to be lightweight.

Let me clarify this a bit, I wasn't especially lucid on IRC. The
requirements for performance metrics are that gathering the data does
not degrade server performance, and that sampling the metrics does not
block the server. The sampling API itself does not need to be
super-thin, because you only need to provide one or two samples per
second.

> The wrapper can instead sample data
> via xmetrics api providing it to the consumer.  The wrapper obviates
> the need for James to provide his api as part of libnet or anysuch.

I would be very happy for there to be a management API that I could add
metrics consumer functions to. It would actually make my life a lot
easier as I could throw awaya bunch of my grungy mmap code. I'm not too
fussed what the API is ... Jerry's suggestion of MS-RPC would be just
fine ...

-- 
James Peach | jpeach at samba.org