Re: bonobo activation question

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Wed, 2002-08-07 at 09:01, Michael Meeks wrote:
> >  I think there is a chance to
> > do it very easily, simply by creating a b-a-s daemon which listens to
> > some well known port
> 
> 	Who listens to the 'well known port' the user ? or the machine ? if the
> user, what if it's a multi-user machine ? the 'well known port' thing
> just doesn't work in that case. If the machine - then, yes it'd be
> lovely to have a compartmentalized activation / component registry per
> machine, but it's a security nightmare; lets get the per user case
> working first.
> 
I think it should be a system-wide daemon, not a per-user one, since if
it's a per-user one, what if b-a-s hasn't been started yet? Also, if
it's a multi-user machine, with many users connected, it would mean
having n*2 daemons running (*2 because there would the 'normal' b-a-s
daemon and the remote one).

That system-wide daemon could just listen on the port, and get requests
from clients in the form:

GET OAFIID:GNOME_Whatever USER=rodrigo PASSWORD=mypassword

then, he could just su to that user (rodrigo), do the normal b-a-s
activation, and then return back the IOR of the activated object.

Another possibility would be to have a simple protocol like:

USER rodrigo
-> OK
PASSWORD mypassword
-> OK
QUERY repo_ids.has('IDL:Bonobo/Control:1.0') and whatever....
-> return list of objects
ACTIVATE OAFIID:GNOME_Whatever
-> return IOR
BYE
-> BYE

> >  and gets queries from b-a-s clients requiring a remote object,
> 
> 	How do you require the remote object ?
> 
well, we may need to extend the syntax of b-a-s queries, to support
that, so that you can just specify the machine, user, password on it. So
that you can say:

bonobo_activate_object ("OAFIID:GNOME_Whatever and HOST=host and
USER=rodrigo AND password=mypassword");

or something like that.

Another nice idea would be to get back remote objects when you do a
query. For that, we could just broadcast the query, and get the results
back from any machine exporting remote components, so that if you do a
query in your local machine for components implementing the
Bonobo/Control interface, you'll get back the local as well as any
remote object installed on the network.

For extra security, we could just have a list of trusted machines, as
you do with NFS, for instance, where you explicitly allow hosts/networks
to access your exported volumes.

> >  and just send back the IOR of those objects after having
> > activated them.
> 
> 	Sending the IOR back is easy; how do you activate a remote object, how
> do you reconcile the remote database of what objects are present and can
> be activated with what you have locally efficiently etc. etc.
> 
the daemon I propose is just a wrapper for the local b-a-s, so it just
activates objects, returns IORs and quit. The registry of activated
components would still be part of the 'normal' b-a-s daemon, which would
be running per-user.

It's only an idea, so it may be wrong, but it is the easiest and
cleanest way I see to implement it.

cheers