random topics
by Howard Chu
Some of these should go onto the roadmap or TODO list. Just scribbling them
down here before I forget.
Had a chat with tridge and abartlet about the LDAP TXN support they're looking
for with Samba4. One of their requirements was being able to do reads inside
the TXN, and that is explicitly not supported by the LDAP TXN draft. But after
talking a bit more about how they do things in LDB, we decided to take the
same approach here - LDB only allows one writer when a TXN is active. We can
write a (global) overlay that gives this same behavior, and then not have to
worry about any of the other TXN details.
While thinking about back-mdb, I realized that since we're mapping storage to
memory we don't really need a traditional disk-DB structure. Instead we can
just manage the space as its own heap and use in-memory structures like AVL
trees and such. I've been thinking about extending our current AVL library to
a T-tree implementation. Further reading along those lines led me to
Cache-Sensitive T-trees (CST-Trees) which also have the important property of
being friendly to CPU cacheline sizes, and so behaving a lot better in
multi-processor systems. This is a pretty generic project - if anyone's been
looking for a relatively self-contained bit of work they could contribute,
this would be ideal. You can get the paper here:
http://ids.snu.ac.kr/wiki/CST-Trees:_Cache_Sensitive_T-Trees
(Note that these things are only good because they can fit all the keys into a
single node - i.e., they only have their most desirable properties when keys
are small. We could certainly use them for the id2entry index, and maybe a few
others, but in the general case we need to be able to use pointers to
arbitrary data as keys.)
ITS#6301 also fed into this search, but I think we just want to use threaded
AVL here instead of the Red-Black tree code. That would shrink the size of the
patch down considerably, which would also be a good thing. Again, anyone
looking for a relatively small project, this one is pretty straightforward.
Also a completely fringe topic, but still interesting - we've got OpenLDAP
running well on Android now; on a G1 phone. But it's still just a set of
command-line tools. UnboundID showed off their Java LDAP SDK in a simple app
also running on Android. A combination of these two would make an extremely
powerful package:
Develop a canned slapd config that uses syncrepl to sync with a remote LDAP
address book. Use proxied multimaster, to allow local changes to be propagated
back to the remote directory. Write a java app that uses LDAP for the G1's
contact book backend instead of the SQLite ****stuff that it's currently
using. Accomplishing this will necessitate writing a few GUI menus for
configuring the handful of variables needed for the slapd config.
This also brings me to another topic - adopting features from OpenDS... They
expose a cn=Tasks tree which can be used for submitting tasks via LDAP.
Currently we expose our runqueue under cn=Monitor but that's only read-only.
It would be nice to be able to submit/schedule/trigger tasks on the fly... In
particular, it would be nice to have a defined task for triggering a syncrepl
refresh.
The Android slapd config would be a refreshOnly syncrepl consumer. It would
also have a hidden back-ldap refreshOnly consumer replicating from its local
database and writing to the remote master. This way both push and pull would
be under control of the Android device. (You have no idea how much of a bill
you can rack up with fully automatic background synching. It's much better to
have this under complete user control.) The GUI would just submit a request to
cn=Tasks to trigger a synch.
OpenDS also has matching rules defined for comparing timestamp attributes to
"current server time". This is extremely handy for a lot of things. Again,
this is a small, self-contained project that should be simple for someone to
jump in on.
More ideas later...
--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
13 years, 7 months
RE24 call for testing
by Quanah Gibson-Mount
Please test RE24 for 2.4.19 preparation. Thanks!
--Quanah
--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Engineer
Zimbra, Inc
--------------------
Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration
13 years, 7 months
advertising compiled-but-not-instantiated overlays
by Aaron Richton
2.4.18 releases slapo-sssvlv. Now my servers are advertising
VLV/sortKeyList as supportedControls. Thing is, I don't specify "overlay
sssvlv" so they're not really "supported" in any meaningful way. Searches
that specify the controls just error out fast. I'm not particularly
inclined to enable the feature, but I'm not sure if somebody else might
want it in their installation, so I'd prefer to keep it compiled in.
This is the case with all overlays across the board. For example,
configure --enable-modules --enable-overlays=mod and syncprov isn't
advertised in test000. But if you just ./configure and run test000, you
see 1.3.6.1.4.1.4203.1.9.1.1 despite the fact that there's no way test000
could provide LDAP Sync as configured. (Recall that --enable-syncprov
defaults to yes.)
To me it's counterintuitive and "false advertising": unless there's an
"overlay syncprov" in slapd.1.conf, I don't see why that should show up in
test000. Thoughts?
13 years, 8 months
