From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Apr 19 14:39:40 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA17983 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Sun, 19 Apr 1998 14:39:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from smtp04.primenet.com (smtp04.primenet.com [206.165.6.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA17928 for ; Sun, 19 Apr 1998 21:39:25 GMT (envelope-from tlambert@usr08.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp04.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA19297; Sun, 19 Apr 1998 14:39:19 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr08.primenet.com(206.165.6.208) via SMTP by smtp04.primenet.com, id smtpd019278; Sun Apr 19 14:39:12 1998 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr08.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA14350; Sun, 19 Apr 1998 14:39:10 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199804192139.OAA14350@usr08.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Discussion : Using DHCP to obtain configuration To: rotel@indigo.ie Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 21:39:09 +0000 (GMT) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199804191102.MAA00294@indigo.ie> from "Niall Smart" at Apr 19, 98 12:02:09 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > > > Oh.. and while I'm dreaming, how about using portalfs or similar as > > > > such: mount /etc with portalfs and have a translator present all of > > > > the data from the database in traditional format. > > > > > > This is a *terrifically* cool idea! > > Would this be read-only or read-write? > > Read-write sounds tough. It is harder, but not significantly difficult. The problems lie mostly in comment fields in files like /etc/protocols; if you want to maintain them, you will need to modify the getprotoent(3) function to allow them to be returned. I view the need to provide this as a need to support statically linked programs that are linked against a legacy libc. This is mostly a problem for BSD code alone, though a much smaller subset of the databases are accessed by Linux and other emulated platforms. Most of this code is not read/write code, since there is not a libc(3) mechanism for writing password entries, /etc/services or similar files, etc.. The databases are themselves predominantly read-only, and tend to change infrequently (with the exception of the accounts database, which is already using this model and importing/exporting; that code would be easy to roll in). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message