[Freedombox-discuss] FBx Configuration Management

[bnewbold at robocracy.org]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2012, Michael Williams wrote:

> To add to what you said, I think we should definitely have fine
> grained access control to system-wide configuration. The idea of a
> shared server resource between individuals has been dawning on me, so
> I really want a way for people to share their FBx with other people,
> and still let everyone configure their own services. This same concept
> should expand to any type of server, not just plug servers.

Thanks for the reply!

To me the most appealing way to have multiple hosted individuals on a 
single box would be to create lightweight virtual machine containers for 
them so that each user gets a proper login and can fully customize their 
environment. I don't know if this is feasible on the DreamPlug hardware, I 
ran in to trouble getting LXC up and running.

I don't know anything about existing strong access control mechanisms for 
systems configuration (windows registry? d-bus? something gnome? 
android?), and it seems like too much to build in a day or two, so next 
week i'll probably just go ahead with a single user system.

> About the current Plinth set-up, I'm interested in making a per-module
> platform using zeromq (http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all) and zerorpc
> (https://github.com/dotcloud/zerorpc-python) instead of python
> modules. I like the idea of allowing services to be written in any
> language they want, as long as they abide by a common message-passing
> protocol. I can imagine the topology being:
>
> client -> front-end -> per-user service -> per-user/per-module service
>
> OR
>
> client -> front-end -> system-wide/per-module service.

I don't understand the motivation. I guess I assumed Plinth modules would 
be very small user interface wrappers around existing services or tools 
which are already written in many languages.

-bryan