Monitoring slapd entities...

[Pierangelo Masarati <ando@sys-net.it>]

What back-monitor does in many cases is monitoring entities living
inside slapd.  In those cases, the living entity and back-monitor's
entry should be in touch with each other to account for reciprocal
updating.  The flow of information, so far, has been handled in one
direction by providing a neutral interface (actually, two):

- the per-subsystem hooks
- the callbacks

Callbacks are much more general than per-subsystem hooks.  I think
per-subsystem stuff should be eliminated, as they basically duplicate
callbacks with less flexibility.

However, I believe bi-directional communication could make many things
much easier.

Let's think what operations may require either direction: back-monitor
needs to be able to ask living entries information when it is asked to
present entries (e.g. in response to a search).  For this purpose, the
current callback mechanism should be sufficient.

However, living entities may need to contact back-monitor for many
purposes: to register new callbacks, to add/remove themselves to/from
back-monitor.  For this latter purpose, a solution could be to augment
all living entities with a pointer to their entry in back-monitor.  This
pointer should be set by back-monitor as soon as that entry is created.
 This would ease feature registration by acting as a key (the caller
would finally know the real DN of its entry), rather than figuring out a
mechanism to locate it as it is currently done by the
monitor_back_register_* calls.  Basically, BackendInfo, BackendDB,
overlay_info and overlay_inst would need an (Entry * (*)_monitor) to
their entry in back-monitor, to be mostly used as a key when calling
monitor-related functions.  Other structures in the future may need it,
but the interface would be general enough to allow extensions.  Comments?

p.



Ing. Pierangelo Masarati
OpenLDAP Core Team

SysNet s.r.l.
via Dossi, 8 - 27100 Pavia - ITALIA
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