[bind10-dev] How to have a pleasant conversation with the administrator about life, the universe, and everything, OR The Problem of the Unused SQL Column

[Shane Kerr]

Hello,

I noticed there is a column called "dnssec" in the "zones" table. I
checked with Evan, and he says this column is unused.

I'd like to remove it. Presumably this means a new schema_version (2 I
think).

We had some discussion earlier over what is involved with such a change.
Ideally the system would detect that an earlier version is in use and
automatically upgrade if possible. (In this case it is quite easy.)

This becomes tricky because we need to know *when* to upgrade. For
example, this may take a long time if the system has very large zones,
and administrators may upgrade the software, and then not want to wait
while the SQL database grinds away changing tables.

What I we may want is a way for a module to indicate that it wants some
administrator action. The way that this information actually gets to the
administrator can vary; the bindctl can display a message when it starts
up, or it can appear in syslog (perhaps repeated each day?), or we can
create a module which sends a status e-mail periodically about how the
server is running.

This is a bit like logging, but I think also perhaps different. I
consider it a bit like your operating system reminding you with a little
icon that it is time to reboot after applying security patches.

While the idea occurred to me in the context of upgrading a table, it
can be used for anything that requires an administrator to do something.

Anyway, once we have a system that expects administrators to do
something, then we have to have a way for them to do the upgrade. I
think in this case a little script is probably the answer, although we
also need to send a message to the c-channel to let all of the tasks
know they need to re-connect to the data source.

Thoughts?

--
Shane