On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
1. On Windows, if the the service wrapper has started some openvpn
processes before our gui agent is started, how should find out about
those processes?
I think it's an important point worth some discussion on whether to (a)
put all the "intelligence" in the GUI applet and have the service
wrapper just be a basic proxy to an admin-privileged CreateProcess, or
(b) write a portable service wrapper that's designed to run on all the
OSes which OpenVPN currently supports, and which would do all the
"under-the-hood" work in starting/stopping/managing of different
OpenVPN processes, and the GUI applet would do nothing more than export
the control interface of the portable service wrapper to a
platform-specific, lightweight GUI.
(b) already exists. It's daemontools. (Does not exist on NT, though).
Daemontools' license is not open enough, but there is a opensource clone
at http://smarden.org/runit/.
...
What I am trying to say? I am very happy that you guys are actively
working on openvpn. Really.
Just please do not OVERdesign it.
Maybe it's better to try to port daemontools to Windows
and run openvpn daemon(s) under it.
I agree that we must watch out so we don't overdesign it. It's easily
done. However, one thing to keep in mind is that we're not talking about
adding complexity to the openvpn binary (except for an interface to get
status information), and we're not talking about removing current
functionallity.
Which means that it will still be perfectly possible to run openvpn just
like we have always done from the cmd-line or from the init-scripts, and I
think this will continue to be the most-used method on unix platforms.
Windows users on the other hand tends to want automatic graphical
installation packages and a nice gui to click on, and get afraid if they
need to edit a textfile! So we need to keep the whole chain from
installation to operating really simple.
Do you think we can achive this using deamon tools?
--
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