Samba Management

[Volker Lendecke]

Hi, Chetan!

Taking this to samba-technical, this is of broader interest
I think.

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 02:56:36PM +0530, Chetan D Shringarpure wrote:
> I have been following the libelektra development on samba-technical and I 
> would think that storing of smb.conf in binary format has been and will be 
> shot down whenever it is brought up.  Its invariably tough to prove it to 
> *nix people that anything not editable by vi is a good idea.

Putting conf data into binary files is a bit hard to
swallow, true. But as the requirement to machine-edit that
data grows we probably have to do it somehow.

The idea is the following:

We convert Samba to look up its config data via libelektra
(or some derivative).

The first config that is asked is the binary one that is
fully editable via msrpc.

We enable "include =" in libelektra, this should then
include the classic smb.conf. Probably libelektra needs to
be adapted to our smb.conf specialities.

When presenting the classic smb.conf retrieved via include,
libelektra refuses changes to this part of the
configuration.

We ship with a default binary file that only does
"include = /etc/samba/smb.conf"
(or /usr/local/samba/lib/smb.conf)...

This would give compatibility with existing setups. It is
the the admin's choice to go with the hand-written smb.conf
that is read-only via the fancy API and the editable part
that is stored in some obscure format.

Something else that needs to be done is to convert an
existing smb.conf into the internal format for an admin to
change his preference.

I think this might be a possible compromise that satisfies
everybody.

> I would certainly be interested in understanding how to extend rpc pipes 
> to connect to libelectra / loadparm / xmetrics. For this I am looking at 
> msrpc a bit closely now along with the data sources and how they can be 
> linked.

This should not be too hard I think. Libelektra is
explicitly made to match regedit semantics, so if we have
all our configuration via libelektra the normal registry
rpcs need to plug into that. We have faked registry data
already in place, so the idea is to have another registry
tree hook in there.

What we then certainly need is something like the Samba4
ldbedit tool that uses the regedit calls to make it easy to
configure via a text mode interface.

Volker
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