Quoth Chris Ridd on Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 08:54:18AM -0700:
> We're adding support for SMF to all our products, and are having an
> argument about the correct names for each service. To keep all our
> services together, we're intending to use FMRIs looking like
> <category>/<companyname>/<service>:<instance>.
If your service implements a standard, then I think you should leave
your company's name out, of the serivce name at least.
If your service implements a standard with some incompatibilities, or
you otherwise anticipate that the implementation will diverge from the
standard, then you should probably include the company name somewhere.
I believe we have allowed for provider-specific names via
a comma-delimited prefix, where the prefix is a stock symbol or
Java-style reverse domain name. Like network/SUNW,service .
If your service implements multiple standards, then I think the service
name should probably be company-specific, and maybe should contain
a prefix as mentioned above.
> Our products are an X.500/LDAP server, an SMTP and X.400 MTA (multiple
> services), and an IMAP/POP message store (also multiple services).
> We're expecting some customers to need multiple instances of some of
> these services on a single box.
We would prefer that services which implement standards all use the same
service name, so that other services which declare dependencies on the
service (not a particular instance) can function regardless of which
implementation is used.
> The only docs I've been able to dig up (at bigadmin) suggest that
> either the application or network categories would be appropriate. How
> do we choose? The bigadmin doc gives an example of apache as something
> in the application category. However Solaris 10 *actually* has
> a network/http:apache2 service :-)
The distinction in our internal documentation is
network Services concerned with host-centric, network
infrastructure capabilities.
application General software services.
I'm not sure how this fits in with the protocols you mentioned, but it
seems to me that a good rule of thumb would be that if a service is
usually used to serve external hosts, and there's a standard for it,
then the network category would be appropriate.
David
