perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[SCHAER Frederic <>]

Hi,

 

First, I’d like to thank the perfsonar developpers for their work. This tool is very valuable to me.

And I’d like to apologize if the rest of this email looks a bit harsh, I tried to remain constructive ;)

 

SO.

I’d like to point out the weirdness of one (several ?) perfsonar configuration files.

I’m sure there’s a reason behind this, but I’m failing at understanding how good this reason can be.

 

The config file subject of this rant is : /etc/perfsonar/lsregistrationdaemon.conf

 

The format is a weird mix of “key <blanck> value” + some sort of xml “tagging” which then includes key+blank+value stuff which is not xml (or is it ?).. all of this being partially managed through the web interface.

 

Exerpt from the example file :

allow_internal_addresses     0

 

#<administrator>

#    name      J. Admin

#    email    

#</administrator>

 

 

The issue with that is that this makes management of this file (or at least parts of it) almost impossible, because there is no obvious tool capable of handling such a weird/custom format.

There are plenty of standard config file formats, of which I’m sure many would be capable of handling the varying number of </service> tags using for instance sections and subsections… while still allowing editing parts of the file with standard tools like Augeas without touching the rest of the generated config. Augeas can even do XML if needed.

 

I’m currently attempting to adapt my puppet setup to the new perfsonar updates, hence this hopefully constructive comment ;)

Maybe there’s a perfsonar tool shipped with the toolkit that allows CLI editing of this file (the purpose being to be able to provision a server with as little manual intervention as possible, ideally none), but for now I’m failing at finding a solution to provision the administrator “section” for instance .

 

Regards

Frederic

 

P.S : Augeas in theory is capable of editing XML, even if I feel XML isn’t a terribly admin-friendly format…