Three further ideas on sysadmin stuff.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

A few more ideas I had this morning:

	1. We need to have each one of our modules support
           --dump-state and --restore-state.

	   The state would hopefully be an XML representation of the
	   state managed by a given module.  For example, the resolver
	   module would return something like this when invoked with
	   --dump-state:

		<gnome-admin:resolve>
		    <search-domain>helixcode.com</search-domain>
		    <search-domain>nuclecu.unam.mx</search-domain>
		    <nameservers>
		      <ns>132.248.10.2</ns>
		      <ns>132.248.29.8</ns>
		    <nameservers>
	        </gnome-admin:resolve>

	   And should be able to restore the system state from this
	   XML file.  

	   This means that we can backup the system configuration into
	   a nice set of files and restore them (say after a system
	   upgrade) or if we want to replicate a machine
	   configuration, or if we just want to keep a historic record
	   of configuration changes in a machine.

	   Obviously --dump-state and --restore-state should be
	   runnable without any X intervention.

	2. Webmin seems to be pretty complete when it comes to system
           administration.  Maybe we can use the core of the
           functionality of Webmin to do the actual work, and just
           write the GNOME user interface on top of it.

	3. I forgot number 3 while typing (1) and (2).

	4. I looked at Gecco some (gecco.sourceforge.net), some of the
	   code might be reusable, but it is very important that we
	   add support for invoking opertions trough CORBA (maybe we
	   only need --dump-state and --restore-state as CORBA
	   methods? maybe not).

Miguel.