Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 20:45:13 -0700 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@flugsvamp.com>, arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: DJBDNS vs. BIND Message-ID: <3A9339C9.C23CBC04@softweyr.com> References: <200102202116.OAA27627@usr05.primenet.com>
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Terry Lambert wrote:
>
> > It would be fairly trivial to monitor a configuration file with kevent,
> > which would generate a notice whenever the file is changed/copied/renamed,
> > etc. I believe that John-Mark Gurney had patches somewhere to implement
> > exactly this for inetd.
> >
> > The problem is that under our current model, the administrators do not
> > expect writes to the file to take immediate effect, and this immediately
> > breaks POLA. So while it could be done, it may not be a good idea. At
> > the very least, I would argue that it should be hidden behind a flag option.
>
> This is what makes something with an API a better bet, since
> you can define it to be a semantic of the API. That prevents
> a POLA violation.
>
> I like that people are willing to at least discuss using a new
> API that isn't implemented everywhere; many of the system calls
> we have today started out that way, too, and it was use, which
> proved their utility, which propelled them to the level of a
> standard.
Given that we have kqueue monitoring for files, I'd suggested an otherwise
unused file flag and a chflags command to twiddle it. A daemon could
monitor for changes to the "config" flag and re-read the file upon this
event; the administrator could simple "chflags config /etc/inetd.conf"
to notify anyone interested that inetd.conf has been changed and should
now work.
> Lets not hamstring ourselves over having to hide such a fundamental
> improvement behind a flag, before we even know the shapes it might
> take. We'll have the rest of time to be self limiting, after we
> figure out what it should look like. 8-).
Or, rather than hiding them behind a change in an otherwise unrelated
flag, put one up there that means exactly what we're asking for.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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