The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

Toshio Kuratomi toshio at tiki-lounge.com
Tue Mar 28 23:32:18 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 14:56 -0800, Shane Stixrud wrote:
> >
> > Writing configuration files and configuration file parsers is boring,
> > frustrating, error-prone work.  If elektra is the right solution we
> > should see new projects embracing it.  After that happens, you'll start
> > seeing buyin from the established projects.
> >
> > How to get more new projects to use it?  More language bindings would
> > definitely help....
> 
> That may be the case, but for some applications say named, dhcp or ldap 
> does it not seem reasonable that a generic configuration format may 
> require a balance between putting less logic in the config structure 
> requiring more of the application?  If so I can see how this would be a 
> turn off for some applications even though it may be an overall win for 
> the system as a whole.
> 
dhcp snippet (dhcp is not on here so hopefully this snippet is valid):
default-lease-time           21600;
subnet 10.202.46.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    use-host-decl-names      on;
    option log-servers       10.202.46.2;
    host ws001 {
        hardware ethernet    00:11:22:33:44:55;
        fixed-address        192.168.0.1;
        default-lease-time   10000
        filename             "/lts/vmlinuz-2.4.26-ltsp-1";
    }
}

Here's the same thing in .ini style:
[global]
default-lease-time 21600

[10.202.46.0]
netmask 255.255.255.0
use-host-decl-names on
log-servers 10.202.46.2

[ws001]
subnet 10.202.46.0
hardware-ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55
fixed-address 192.168.0.1
default-lease-time 10000
filename "/lts/vmlinuz-2.4.26-ltsp-1"

I'd argue that as the number of subnets and special case workstations
goes up, the ability of a system administrator to read and understand
the flat file is going to be markedly harder than for the admin to read
the custom-crafted dhcp-config syntax.

So if the end-goal is to keep the system-administrator's poor brain from
exploding while manually editing the files, I'd say custom-crafted
config files can be a win versus the generic one-size-fits-all approach.

-Toshio
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