Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
Howard Chu writes:
The other alternative, which is much simpler to implement, is just to add a suffixmassage/rewrite keyword to the syncrepl config, allowing it to pull from a particular remote base and map it to the local base. Then it's up to the sysadmin to create a complete cn=config hierarchy somewhere else on the master server and let the slaves pick it up. That would address all of the issues of differentiation, at the cost of a little bit of redundancy on the master.
Can translucent be made to combine with back-relay and rwm? Then the other database need only maintain differences from the main config, and there's less problem with keeping the two config databases in sync.
Translucent is currently a bit too limited here; it only allows customizing of entries that exist in the master. It doesn't allow creating new entries that only exist in the local/translucent DB.
All this reminds me of another wish/gripe of mine, though not one to address in RE24: cn=config modifies input data and adds default values to the user-provided data. I'd much prefer it to only do ordinary attribute normalization.
I would have preferred not to generate the default values either, but as Ando frequently reminds me, relying on unstated defaults is error-prone...
I've suggested ;x-original attribute options or something to show what was really written, but a cleaner alternative would be to have two config databases: One database with just the data stored by the admin, and one read-only in-memory which back-config builds from the stored data. Changes to inherited data would be iffy though, since they'll apply to several databases and may need to be reverted in early databases if they fail in late ones.
Back to this discussion, that would also allow for variables and simple conditionals to be stored in the read-write database, which would be expanded when copied to the read-only config database. Also if back-config builds the real configuration from several entries through inheritance anyway, that might be expanded to build the config from multiple config trees - the main config + the server-specific config as above. No, definitely not for RE24:-)
Now that sounds like overkill... We also want something that we can easily document and explain to people....