Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!romp!auschs!awdprime!sanders.austin.ibm.com!sanders
From: sanders@peyote.cactus.org (Tony Sanders)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Who's in charge here: Oracle or Unix?
Keywords: Oracle, system, files
Message-ID: <5223@awdprime.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 91 22:40:13 GMT
References: <635@uswnvg.UUCP>
Sender: news@awdprime.UUCP
Reply-To: sanders@peyote.cactus.org (Tony Sanders)
Organization: IBM AWD, Austin
Lines: 47
Originator: sanders@sanders.austin.ibm.com

In article <635@uswnvg.UUCP> gbarnet@uswnvg.UUCP (Gary Barnette) writes:
>Request for open discussion:
>[question about having system files as an oracle database]
I didn't quite understand your exact situation but here are some of my
thoughts on various ways of doing what you proposed.  For the record
I'm a system administrator.

Method 1: Hard
    It would be nice if you could implement this with watchdogs or
    something similar.  You of course want to be able to "vi /etc/passwd"
    and have the result written back into the database, with locking such
    that only one person could open /etc/passwd or the database "rw", then
    "grep foo /etc/passwd" works and everyone is happy (maybe).

    This way you get some of the benefits of using a database and a
    text file all rolled into one.  Of course, it would be nice if the
    watchdog could keep a local copy of what it thinks should be in
    this file in case the network server is down.

Method 2: Easy
    Write programs that extract the data from the database and distribute
    it at some interval (nightly) to all the systems under it's control.
    You can either set this up such that each client requests the data on
    demand or the server force updates on the client.  Or a mixture of both.

    This method requires a lot less code and from my experience updating
    nightly is sufficient.

It makes certain aspects of system administration easier to have a
central database and an EASY way to add/delete user/hosts/etc.  One big
problem is that a central database scheme just won't scale up forever.
How big will your network of systems be in 5 years? 10? 20?
How big were systems 5 years ago? 10? 20?

In my experience we were the ones that maintained the database and that
certainly changes some of the questions (if sysadm people are responsible
for security you don't want people who don't know anything about security
maintaining the database that controls all access to machines on your
network).

BTW: It's not an unreasonable request for (some of) the system administration
people to learn oracle.

-- sanders@peyote.cactus.org
First rule of software:  Throw the first one away.
and so on...
I am not an IBM representative and I speak only for myself.