Re: dynamic /bin /sbin

[Peter da Silva <peter-dragonfly@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Coleman wrote:
> The disadvantage is that if this 
> daemon dies, your box is dead in the water.  Considering that this 
> daemon would get more complicated with time (as you add more methods to 
> authenticate), this could be worrisome.

Indeed. The design of the name service needs to be robust, but this
is just a special case of a general design consideration for any
server based operating system. If a server dies, then you need to
make allowances for it: detect it and restart the server, detect
it and start a fallback server, detect it and flag it so the userapi
can switch to a fallback mechanism, and so on.

As Dragonfly evolves, we're likely to run into this issue over and
over again, we need to think of the general case and the best way to
handle it. One thing I do in server-based applications I write is to
have a simple application manager (similar to the System V init) that
has a table of servers to start, how to tell if they're still running
(usually because they exit), and what to do when they exit or emit a
status that indicates they want to exit.