Review request: DNS server implementation

simo idra at samba.org
Fri Oct 15 06:06:13 MDT 2010


On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 11:03 +1100, tridge at samba.org wrote:
> Hi Simo,
> 
>  > > This is one of the things that bit Nadya at the AD plugfest. She
>  > > thought she'd debug bind using gdb, but didn't know that she needed to
>  > > do ". /etc/default/bind" before starting gdb. The resulting errors
>  > > were not helpful :-)
>  > 
>  > Not really a bind fault ...
> 
> I think it is. A package shouldn't have essential parameters like
> spread out in different places. People expect configuration of bind to
> be in /etc/bind, but in this case is isn't.

A lot of apps defer keytab overriding to the environment variable not
just bind. I can't say I like it, but it is not unexpected for admins
that are used to configure machines with kerberos.

>  > > yep. Now multiply this by the number of Linux distros and versions of
>  > > distros out there :-)
>  > 
>  > I can assure you it works on Fedora/RHEL with SELinux :-)
> 
> do both of those distros have bind 9.7.2rc1 or later? It didn't work
> with any earlier version without patches.

I was referring to SELinux and Kerberos stuff.

> The pattern in Samba4 is to make things runtime options, not compile
> time options. So there would be a runtime option to enable/disable the
> builtin DNS server. That makes it much easier for people to choose
> what options they want when they use a pre-built package.
> 
> Because the DNS server will be integrated into the samba binary, the
> additional space it takes will be tiny (maybe a few kb?).

I still wish we could isolate each server into it's own shared library,
and just let bin/samba load all of them at startup (unless configured to
not start a specific service). This way we can have both services
running in a single process for your use case but also the ability to
remove stuff one does not care about by simply not installing the
corresponding shared library.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>



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