Future Plans

The basic concepts behind the LCFG system have proven very sound and the system has been extremely successful. However, a number of aspects of the implementation were not intended for wider large scale use. In particular:

• We would like a finer grained access control on the resource ``database'', so that we could delegate management more easily.
• We would like a more secure and efficient technology than NIS for distributing resource maps.
• We intend to rewrite the framework for constructing subsystem scripts using a more object-oriented approach, and a different language.

It seems likely that we will use LDAP as the configuration resource repository, and a Perl framework for the subsystem scripts.

We have also learned a good deal about the way in which sysadmins want to specify configurations and classes, and we intend to implement a custom language for describing machine configurations. The design of this language is still under discussion, but we would like to provide:

• Multiple inheritance and mutation.
• Some form of typing to allowing better validation for resource values.
• The ability to specify components (such as a disk configuration) which could be used by several machines (or several times by the same machine).

The current system is also tied closely to other local procedures, making it difficult to export, and we would like to address this, so that we can export it as open source (see below).