James Carlson wrote: > Roland Mainz writes: [snip] > > There are a small minor > > nits which cause some scratching at the backside of my brain evertimes I > > look at the code (for example /etc/hosts.(allow|deny) sitting in /etc/ > > instead of /etc/inet/ (Solaris is SysV based and not BSD)) ... ;-( > > Actually, quite a bit of thought went into that. It wasn't merely > tossed into the system. > > The main consideration here was that we felt it was likely that there > would be scripts and tools (such as webmin) that knew about the normal > /etc/ location of the configuration files, and burying them in > /etc/inet/ out of a sense of SysV propriety would be a mistake.
SysV wasn't "propriety" ... the authors just cleaned the system configuration up and I wish the rest of Solaris would honor that... the deployment of "hosts.allow" and "hosts.deny" in /etc was IMHO a step backwards into the direction of the dark ago of *BSD Unix where all files were dumped in a flat /etc (turning this directory in a giant garbage can). > In addition, users who maintain multiple platforms would end up > confused and annoyed -- they'd somehow have to train their system > administrators to understand that Solaris is screwy, different from > all the rest, and has hidden the configuration files in an unexpected > location. Administering a heterogeneous environment would become more > difficult. > > And then there are those (the great majority, I think) who already run > tcp_wrappers on an older release of Solaris, and would expect it to > work properly on upgrade to the new release. Moving the configuration > files would simply make that more difficult. > > It would make the software harder to use and harder to understand > without actually giving us any clear benefit. I know... and I partially agree. But I think there is a better solution for this case. For example the "hosts" database file lives physically in /etc/inet/hosts and a symlink at /etc/hosts points to that file. The same could be done for "hosts.allow" and "hosts.deny", e.g. put the files physically into /etc/inet/ and provide symlinks from /etc to those files. That would honor the original SysV design choice and gurantees backwards-compatibilty to older Solaris releases and other platforms (anyone who wants to sponsor such a change/patch please raise the hand... :-) ). ---- Bye, Roland P.S.: Setting Reply-To: to networking-discuss at opensolaris.org -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
