I never understood why the openldap
developers shy away from providing sensible defaults or example configurations
Sometimes that attitude can appear like
a form of technical arrogance, but popular reasons quoted for their approach
seem to be
- RTFM, things are documented
somewhere, you just need to read it all
- defaults would not reduce traffic
on the list
- we cannot cover all te possible systems
and uses of openldap anyway
- a false sense of security and accomplishment
for beginners would be created that would in the long run cause more problems
for everyone
- etc.etc
well as far as I am concerned reasonable
defaults (and a few working examples) would NOT discurage me from reading
the documentation
It would rather flatten the learning
curve a bit by leading beginners to a working (example) setup faster.
Apart from beeing so incouraged to continue
openldap discovery (instead of beeing turned away by common traps that
many beginners seem to fall into), beginners then would also know better
where to look in the documentation to continue to tune/adapt the (already
working) openldap system to their needs
Mind you, for a beginner it is not only
the question _how_ to tune a parameter, but often also _which_ parameter
to begin with. Reasonable defaults and example configurations could act
as great pointers to the documentation to continue the openldap learning
process (with positive feedback instead of negative)
We should ask quanah to publish the
(non-stanford) traffic figures on his excellent openldap documentation
site. These would likely strengthen my point
Am I running my system like stanford
does? NO. Did quanahs documentation teach me a lot about openldap that
I couldn't learn myself (in reasonable time) from the docs? YES
There _is_ a need for sensible defaults
and working examples, and I only see benefits for developing and publishing
these.
-frank
"Armbrust, Daniel
C." <Armbrust.Daniel@mayo.edu> Sänt av: owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org
04-06-14 21.45
Till
openLDAP-software@OpenLDAP.org
Kopia
Ärende
RE: Bdb defaults - WAS: problem
importing entries.
Well, the difference I would note there, is that mySQL
is optional and experimental. Bdb is suggested as the primary database
backend for most users. It seems to me that the app out of the box
should be at least configured for an average use case.
And I wasn't suggesting that we move the configuration back into the slapd.conf
file. I am simply wondering why openldap doesn't pick better defaults
for the case where there is no DB_CONFIG file (which is what most new people
do when they don't yet understand openldap) It sounds like openldap
is falling back on the Berkeley defaults, which have been said to be inappropriate
for openldap.
My other suggestion is that some example DB_CONFIG files be provided -
either prominently on the website, or along with server itself. For
what most people want to do, referring them to the Berkeley documentation
is very overwhelming. We don't need to rewrite/copy all of Berkeley's
information... Just provide some reasonable defaults for the most often
adjusted variables. Then people will have a clue at what documentation
to look at specifically, when they want to tweak things themselves. Currently,
this is not straight forward at all, as no new users of openldap are going
to understand the ramifications of the very technical documentation written
on the Berkeley site.
Which leads directly to a lot of mail here... Why does it perform horribly,
how do I configure this.
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org [mailto:owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org]
On Behalf Of Andreas
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 2:20 PM
To: openLDAP-software@OpenLDAP.org
Subject: Re: Bdb defaults - WAS: problem importing entries.
On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 12:19:01PM -0500, Armbrust, Daniel C. wrote:
> This (and many other recent threads) leads me to ask the question,
why
> doesn't openldap provide more reasonable defaults for bdb, if no DB_CONFIG
> file is present?
Uh oh, you are asking for trouble with this question :)
Think about it like this: what if openldap used MySQL as the backend, should
it include
detailed instructions on how to setup MySQL? It could, but should it?