Re: Late to the party - multiple search domains on the network.

[Derek Atkins <warlord MIT EDU>]

Quoting Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>:
 
> A NetworkInformation service (apologies to NIS) that stores all this
> data both system-wide, and per-user.  Sort of like GConf does multi-
> level config, but not depending on GNOME in any way.
> 
> Services like DHCP clients would push their options to the NI service,
> which would store generic network config values like DNS servers, domain
> names, NTP servers, the rest of the DHCP options, but also system-level
> configuration of such things that the user set in system-config-network,
> YAST, gnome-system-tools, etc.
> 
> I guess the point is that these options can come from more sources than
> DHCP, like you say, but there's no central framework to manage them
> from.  Also, such a daemon should _not_ enforce any policy, simply
> provide an information store from a variety of sources and provide that
> information on demand to clients like NetworkManager, traditional
> network config scripts, BIND/named/dnsmasq, ntpd, etc.
> 
> But you also get into the problems of "What's my current DNS server?"
> when you're on a PPP connection and have a VPN active.  The PPP
> connection has its own DNS servers, but the VPN connection might also
> have its own DNS servers.  How do you present that information to the
> rest of the system?  A "stack" approach where PPP pushes its info, then
> VPN pushes its info on top?  Or "last config wins"?  Both of those
> solutions have problems though.  Much of this information is per-
> interface too, but things like DNS servers, hostname, and domain names
> are generally not.

How does this compare to Debian's "resolvconf" program?  It sounds like they've
got something close to this, albeit perhaps somewhat limited in scope.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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