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New inotifier (v4) finished, and a bunch of (small but cool) new features
I'm proud to announce the new inotifier rewrite (and its bunch of small enhancements), internally and lovely named "hopefully-this-one-will-work-as-expected" (private joke to me). It's shorter than previous version in terms of codelines, albeit more complex when dealing with special cases (large directories, multiple concurrent accesses to same files, re-born just-deleted files or dirs, etc). The new version is many times faster than all previous ones (including the external C-implemented gamin one). When you untar an archive, you can expect more or less the time of the untar process, after it finished, for complete ACLs application. Previously, it could take minutes to do the same (specifically when untarring the linux kernel in a shared dir). licornd is also very smart when talking about resources-consumption: it takes the CPU for ACLs intensive tasks (but only ONE CPU), and doesn't take it long. For what it has to do, I find it well balanced from the functionnality/resource point of view.
The new inotifier and related core.classes additions allow users homes to be watched now, and offer dedicated functionnalities to handle configuration files, and report *real* changes to them (not 'all access', generating a lot of false positives).
dnsmasq backend, privileges directly benefit from this new functionnalities. shadow configuration files watch is more robust and verifies everything when they reload (one could create inconsistencies, editing the files manually; this is taken in account).
There are still some rough edges and evil sub-sonic bugs (perhaps they are all the same, I can't hunt it down for now), but only on very-very heavily loaded systems, where users and groups pop in an out very fast. I will fix them in the next coding cycle.
Hopefully, you won't need the chk group command anymore. If you do, please provide a full trace:
export LTRACE=std licornd -rvD <whatever command in your other terminal>
In the new-but-small-but-cool features category, you'll find the command fuzzy matching:
get u get us get usr get users (and so one, with identical counterparts for add/mod/del/chk)
Will bring you the list of users. In the same kind:
get g -> groups get pro -> profiles get pri -> privileges get kw -> keywords
And so on. Everything is computed when you type it, there are no so-called "fixed values".
In the not-so-small-but-very-cool category, you will find that every part of Licorn® is now fully multi-lingual, on-the-fly: the daemon starts in the system lang, but every thread inside of it can switch to another language, and the client languages are pulled in from the web headers or the calling CLI environment. This makes everything dynamic, at will.
Documentation has been updated for permissions parts.
French tranlation is progressing notably: WMI part is finished, CLI is 90% done, and the rest is more or less 70% done (it doesn't matter anyway, as no user really sees it in real life).
I voluntarily don't mention the core object rewrite. It's very technical and doesn't bring new end-users functionalities, but guarantees that everything is cleaner and easier to extend inside licornd, regarding the users/groups/profiles/privileges/machines point of view.
I probably forgot many things here, but if I had written a book, you won't have read it anyway. Code and *use* the code is better. Many bugs have been fixed, and the code is generally more pythonic and lighter tht before: there are more generators, less hard-coded things, and abstractions (when necessary) got in the right places. At least, this how I wanted to implement them.
Enjoy,
Removed silly limitations on system groups with LDAP backend enabled
Responding to changeset 279 and explaining the reasons of changeset 304, there is now no more limitations when creating system groups.
If the LDAP backend is enabled, the newly created system group will go into the LDAP backend.
This makes NFS works perfectly on LDAP-enabled clients, which now see all groups when listings ACLs and standard posix perms.
Now, the licorn-ldap-server debian package tries to move every important pre-existing system group (acl, licorn-wmi) from the Unix backend to the LDAP one. This will implicitly install them network-wide and avoid the need to create them on every ALT®. Finally this will help propagate admin privileges on every client.
Two small changes worth noticing in add user/group
two points which were pushed in revision 279, because bzr don't know anything about cherry picking (or I don't know how to use it):
- system users/groups are now always created in the Unix backend. this is far from perfect because they have to be replicated for ACLs to work and this will NEED to be done for the cluster, but the cluster doesn't exist yet, so don't bother. This is needed for groups like acl, remotessh and admins, which NEED to be created in /etc/group on the local system before the LDAP backend is activated (they are checked/created before the LDAP setup). This is kind of a workaround because it should work event with these groups in LDAP, but this implies some deep reorganization in the LicornConfiguration class, which will be done later (see #170).
- add a --force argument to add user/group, for the particular case of user/group with same name. This was trigerring a bug on old debian/ubuntu systems, but should be bypassable nowadays, because I expect adduser tools to have been fixed on this particular point.
