[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]

Stephen,

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 10:06 +0100, Stephen Morris wrote:
> On 14 Oct 2010, at 13:32, Shane Kerr wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I see two ways of doing this:
> 
> (a) the module sets a flag that is polled by some monitor to see if
> action is required, at which point the monitor alerts the operator.
> (b) a monitor looks at messages coming from the modules and takes
> action if it sees specific messages.
> 
> Option (b) appears to be the simplest, especially if we were to
> reserve a facility or severity code for such a message.  In a number
> of Unix variants we would get this functionality for free: many
> variants allow you to set up syslog to write a message to all (or
> some) logged on users depending on facility and/or severity.  Some
> variants allow you to route messages to named pipe to which you could
> can attach a program of your choice.

I think it will have to depend on the specifics of what we are trying to
notify. I think modules will:

     1. Need to send a message when they have something to say, and
     2. Need to reply "yes I have a message" when asked.

So, if we are trying to notify administrators using bindctrl, then we
can check for pending notifications when you connect. If we are trying
to notify administrators using the Windows tray, then we will probably
need a separate module that does that which waits for messages to
appear, likewise for e-mail or syslog or whatever.

--
Shane