Re: New project

----- "Ed Sawicki" <ed(at)alcpress(dot)com> wrote:
>
> I've started a new project that involves the management
> of network infrastructure (DNS, DHCP, Web, etc.) that
> has a database at its core rather than a filesystem as
> most similar programs do. I've chosen Postgres for
> numerous reasons but the inspiration for considering it
> are the IPv4, IPv6, and MAC address data types.

Ed,

Alot of these also have the ability to talk directly to postgresql, I know postfix does, courier-imap does, powerdns does.
Not to get boo'd off the list here but you also might want to look into using LDAP as a backend, I've been amazed at how many services have LDAP hooks.
PowerDNS can do ldap or postgres, postfix can do postgresql or ldap, PAM can do LDAP (there's a postgresql module but i've had limited sucess getting anywhere with it), DHCP can do ldap.. Without knowing what services "etc" are, It's hard to go on listing but i think you get my point ;)

> 4. The database must "interface" with Linux daemons that
> have no ability to talk to the database but look to the
> filesystem for their configuration files. I'm going to
> handle this initially with shell scripts that use psql.
> Later, this functionality may be moved to servlets.

VHCS (www.vhcs.net) uses a similiar model, having a 'daemon' script that polls the database every few minutes from a crontask and checks to see if anything needs to be done. I think it's implementation kinda sucks but that if you have to write out system files this is going to be your best option if you want to keep the setup standard (applications and configurations in normal places on the system) as most likely these files will have to be written as root, and you don't want to be running your interface or serverlets as root. The only alternative is to provide a chroot-like location with all the services being owned by one user. But that can make upgrading and adoptation kinda painful, zimbra does this with specialized version of all it's parts (postfix, java, apache, mysql) running as a "zimbra" user. It lets it write to all it's files but when you come in and try to modify things, without having a full understanding of the special layout, things can be painful.

I had been thinking about doing something similiar myself, there are no real good web hosting control panels at the moment, the free ones all suck and are written in php/perl and use mysql. I was thinking rubyonrails with ldap and/or postgres as a backend but havent' gotten time to really research it too carefully.

>
> Ed Sawicki
>
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