Bill Sommerfeld writes:
> On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 18:55 -0400, Peter Memishian wrote:
>
> > But that's just it -- the admin isn't explicitly misconfiguring the
> > system, he's just not familiar with the internal policy decisions that
> > NWAM will make -- and I think it's unrealistic to expect that he can be.
>
> I disagree that it's unrealistic. we need to make the (higher-level)
> policy and policy decisions made by NWAM more observable.
> (the GUI present in build 99 is a big step forward for desktop/laptop
> users).
I certainly agree with making things more observable -- it's hard to
disagree with that -- but I think meem has a point here.
If the administrator himself were somehow invoking DHCP knowingly,
then you could reasonably charge him with "misconfiguration" (or
worse) if he did that while having a filter in place that blocks DHCP.
However, NWAM is different, because it's going to invoke DHCP on its
own. The administrator never really asked. It's likely that as NWAM
matures, it'll invoke many other things on its own.
To me, the resulting confusion isn't much different from something
like IB going behind the administrator's back to establish an NFS
connection to an IP host, when there's an explicit filter rule saying
you "can't" access that host. I think being able to say "I don't want
these packets, and I really mean it, dammit" is an important feature.
I think it'd be much better if the local service could go into some
observable state (SMF "maintenance"?) when misconfigured, and the
explicit issue exposed for the administrator to see ("you, or someone
like you, asked for DHCP here, but the filter rules block that; which
is it?").
There's probably a fair argument to be made to punch holes in the
default firewall policy for explicitly configured services, but that
argument is much harder to make for services run by some intermediary
and where the firewall policies are explicit and from an administrator
rather than some pre-packaged "default" set.
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
