[Planetlab-devel] sfa database

[Sarah Edwards]

I'll bite.

Why _one_ ssh key?

On Dec 2, 2011, at 10:32 AM, Thierry Parmentelat wrote:

> So nobody really has anything to say on this one ?
> meanwhile I think I've reached the conclusion, although this is still fuzzy, that keeping track of one ssh key could be needed as well..
> 
> On Nov 30, 2011, at 6:40 PM, Thierry Parmentelat wrote:
> 
>> Hi folks
>> 
>> As you might know I've spent some time recently, trying to refactor the registry manager in order to make it more generic 
>> 
>> In the process I came across a rather painful issue, that I thought could use a bit of brainstorming here
>> 
>> In essence, I guess I would argue that the SFA db should keep track of at least some of the inter-object relationships
>> In particular for the user x authority at the very least
>> 
>> Right now SFA deeply relies on myplc to retrieve this information; I am referring to 'fill_record_info'; which digs into the myplc database to retrieve the object, its relationships, messes with hrns in the process (in addition this is utterly unefficient); all this is essentially a back and forth between sfa data and plc data to reconstruct relationships.
>> 
>> In order to illustrate my point, imagine a testbed that's entirely dumb, in that it has a rustic account management system (you'd be surprised how common this is; localized testbeds commonly just have a LDAP server somewhere to manage accounts and that's about it)
>> In such a case fill_record_info really can't do much; at first I thought this would only have cosmetic impact, and would only affect sfi show <>
>> But when I got to trying it out, I realized that because the requestor/authority relationship could not be properly reconstructed, no right would be granted to the requestor and thus nobody could do anything on the testbed
>> 
>> So, because this particular relationship is so crucial to the internals of SFA, I would suggest that this info becomes duplicated in the SFA db as well
>> Just checking if that would go against any fundamental design decision that I would have missed, otherwise if that's fine with everyone I would add this to my list (not in the near future, but on a bit longer term)
>> 
>> [[I would in a first implementation just add a very generic obj1 x obj2 x relation_type table so that more relationships can be kept track of locally if need be]]
>> 
>> -- Thierry
>> 
>> 
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> 
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*******************************************************************************
Sarah Edwards
Network Research
Raytheon BBN Technologies
Cambridge, MA

phone:    (617) 873-2329
fax:          (617) 873-6091
email:      sedwards at bbn.com