[SSSD] Design Discussion: Domains, users and groups over D-Bus

Simo Sorce simo at redhat.com
Wed Jan 7 20:05:05 UTC 2015


On Tue, 06 Jan 2015 09:59:08 -0500
Dmitri Pal <dpal at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 01/06/2015 05:54 AM, Jakub Hrozek wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 11:31:55AM +0100, Pavel Březina wrote:
> >>>> *Users*
> >>>> Do we want also to have methods ListDomainUsers() and
> >>>> ListUsers() without the name filter?
> >>> To list all? What about using '*' for that?
> >> We can implement it this way internally, but exposing an easier
> >> way to the consumers is nice, imho.
> > I'm not too opposed, although I prefer minimal APIs.
> >
> >> However, do we actually want to allow to list all users? As Dmitri
> >> suggested we may want to require the minimum filter length since
> >> the number of users may be very high. The maximum D-Bus message is
> >> 128MiB so I think we are good there but I think it can be very
> >> time consuming to return all users without some sort of paging.
> > This feature is internally dependant on enumerate=true, where we
> > already store all standard POSIX attributes (struct passwd, struct
> > group) in-memory, do you think the D-Bus "enumeration" provides
> > that much overhead?
> >
> > Paging would be really complex, we'd need to store the full results
> > in-memory per-client anyway and then pass around some kind of
> > cookie to resume iteration..
> >
> > In a centralized environment, I wouldn't expect the listing
> > commands to be used that commonly. Greeters or login managers (gdm)
> > would typically use the cached users instead. Some applications
> > (Hi, RHEV-M!) choose to display all their users in some kind of
> > table and then I would expect them to implement paging themselves:
> >
> > for letter in a..z:
> >      users = ListUsersByNameFilter($letter)
> >
> >>>> Do we want some other filter options as well?
> >>> In the design I wanted to keep the filtering simple. Unless we
> >>> receive some other requirements..
> >> Yes, you suggested to allow only asterisk. Implement full regular
> >> expression efficiently as Dmitri would be quite problematic since
> >> ldb doesn't support regex lookup thus we would have to do this
> >> ourselves and therefore we would loose indices, or am I wrong?
> > I guess we'd have to grab all the entries and filter them
> > ourselves..
> >
> > (Yes, this is the reason I chose the asterisk notation in the first
> > place) _______________________________________________
> > sssd-devel mailing list
> > sssd-devel at lists.fedorahosted.org
> > https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/sssd-devel
> 
> Several points:
> 
> - IMO having a full regular expression support will be an overhead.
> - "Begins with" filtering with * to indicate the remaining part is
> good enough

reasonable

> - I do not think we should rely on enumeration. I think we should do
> a lookup since these operations will be rare.

Nope.
This is the same thinking the implementers of the nss interface went
through. And then users started using enumeration all the time.

It may be ok to let users programmatically force full enumeration
somehow. But the default should be to return only what is in cache.
If you do otherwise people will test applications using * with 3 users
on the system and then fail spectacularly when there are actually 100K
users in the directory.

> - SSSD should have a configuration option that specifies how short
> the filter can be  - default 3 characters (number of characters
> without asterisk). If application provided a shorter filter becuase
> user typed less characters SSSD would return error indicating that
> filter is too short. We would need to teach oVirt to respect such
> errors.

I am not entirely sure about this, in most applications it will not be
easy to return such errors to users.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York



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