> From: Daniel Dickinson <crazycsh...@gmail.com> > Subject: [OpenWrt-Devel] [RFC] preinit/failsafe customization/modularization > To: openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org > Date: Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 5:31 AM > I have done a significant reworking > of /etc/preinit to make it more > modular and customizable. It is now possible to > configured things like > the failsafe ip. It is also possible to easily > customize what happens > in preinit and failsafe.
Daniel, At a glance, I would say a preinit that's configurable at build time is a good idea. I haven't gotten very far with my work on the Linksys NAS200 but I already noticed that the current (old) preinit was going to need some changes. For example, the NAS200 being basically a storage server, not a router, so the fallback IP address should probably NOT be 192.168.1.1 because it's likely that that address is already in use by another system on the network (e.g. a router running OpenWRT ;-). On the other hand, I would say the preinit should be very small and self-contained, to minimize the chance of bugs or security problems. After all a simple mistake can brick a device at preinit time. As far as I understand, preinit should provide fail-safe/fallback mechanisms, and I wonder if your system (which iterates files in /etc/preinit.d/conf.d and other locations) might invite problems. I can easily imagine users bricking their devices by adding, deleting or changing files in unexpected ways, and I see opportunities for evildoers to "plug in" malicious software, and that would be bad at preinit time because when something is wrong with your system, you'll want a preinit to behave in a perfectly predictable way to bring the system back to working order. It would be better to store all the settings in one file, perhaps hard-code them at the top of the script at build time, and maybe (for targets that support this) allow a removable device like a USB stick to hold override settings. That way, even though the configuration can be changed at runtime (by plugging in a USB stick or whatever), it's always possible to revert to the flash settings by unplugging it. I also wonder how much extra space a modularized preinit might use up on small devices. Maybe there should be a "master switch" in the configuration between Ye Olde non-modular preinit, or the New Shiny preinit stuff? So... my vote is "Yes" on the configurable preinit, but a firm "Hmmm maybe not" on modularizing it. Feel free to flame back if this doesn't make sense -- I'm still a beginner with OpenWRT and as I said I only glanced at your code so I may be totally off on some (or all?) of my arguments. Thanks for the good work! ===Jac _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
