[378] in athena10
Larvnet design discussion
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Tue Aug 5 13:54:27 2008
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:52:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <200808051752.m75HqNEH020805@outgoing.mit.edu>
To: athena10@mit.edu
I'm knocking down the larvnet item for the eventual cluster
deployment. There are four parts:
* Package liblarv (done pending checkin)
* Package busyd (done pending checkin)
* Integrate with gdm (not done)
* Add to cluster metapackage (not done)
liblarv is a very simple library; it knows how to touch or remove a
flag file which means "this workstation is in use", and how to send
off a UDP packet to larvnetd indicating the status. Since UDP packets
can be lost, busyd acts as a backup mechanism; it listens to a port
via inetd and, using liblarv, checks the flag file and responds with a
status packet.
In 9.4, liblarv is integrated directly into the xlogin code. In
Athena 10, I was thinking the best option is to write a simple PAM
module which gets installed into /etc/pam.d/gdm via a
config-package-dev transformation. A few variations on the low-level
implementation of this plan are:
* Create debathena/libpam-larv with the PAM module and
config/gdm-larv with the installation into /etc/pam.d/gdm.
* Shoehorn both into debathena/libpam-dev.
* Shoehorn both into config/gdm-larv.
Opinions before I go ahead? Since this is a very site-specific PAM
module I like the simplicity of a single package for gdm integration
but I don't feel strongly about it.
