Re: named or not?

[Peter Jones <pjones redhat com>]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 01:58 +0200, Tomislav Vujec wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 14:38 -0400, Peter Jones wrote:
> > Both of them should be started by init during boot.  I think starting it
> > through this mechanism is just incorrect.
> 
> Can you elaborate on this? From my point of view, named can either be
> controlled through dbus, or it can be a standalone DNS service. If it is
> standalone, it should be started from init. However, if its main purpose
> is to serve as a name service under the control of NM, I would expect
> that it gets started by it.

But if you're using NM, you're _always_ using NM.  So there's no reason
to control it that way; you may as well always have it on.

But even if you're not using NM, it is feasible (and not even very hard)
to write a vpn connection script that tells bind to change forwarders
just like NM does.

It's also a matter of "do one thing and do it well".  Dbus's job isn't
to spawn daemons when they're needed; it's to provide a communication
mechanism.

> Further more, bind as a package in most distributions doesn't currently,
> and it shouldn't in the future install with the init script enabled for
> any run level, if for nothing else, then for the security purpose.

I'm not sure I buy this; for 90% of installations it shouldn't be
listening on anything but lo anyway.

> Ability to start named as well as dhcdbd as a dbus service, when
> required, simplifies the installation procedure. We definitely want NM
> to "just work", and the only alternative would be to enable dhcdbd and
> named on random run levels, which is just plain wrong.

Effectively we're doing that for all desktop installs either way.
Having two ways it gets started is confusing and unnecessary.
"chkconfig named on" is not complicated enough to merit trying to
"simplify" it by having another process through which the daemon might
be started.

> Finally, I don't think that the configuration where bind runs as a full
> featured DNS server, and NM controls the network is realistic.

Not yet; it is the plan.  But that doesn't matter much, since we both
agree that if you're running a full-blown nameserver you'll start it
with the init script.

-- 
  Peter