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Service_Controller_Daemon

Service_Controller_Daemon#

Overview#

The System Security Services Daemon (the SSSD) is actually a collection of different services and daemons running in the system context. These services handle a variety of authentication and authorization functions. As a result, it is highly imperative that these services are fully available and functional at all times. The continued outage of any service provided by the SSSD may render the machine unusable. To avoid this, the SSSD will provide a special Monitor daemon that will maintain the lifecycle of all other SSSD services.

Main Functions#

The Service Controller will be in charge of:

  • Starting of the SSSD services at launch or the startup of the system

  • Stopping of the SSSD services when it shuts down or at the shutdown of the system

  • Monitor that all the SSSD processes that have to stay alive stay alive

  • Restart any SSSD processes that have exited or crashed

Additional goals of the Monitor daemon are as follows:

  • It must run on all supported client platforms.

  • It should not require the installation of any dependencies that are not installed by default on the supported client platforms.

Internal Logic#

Configuration#

The Monitor service for the SSSD will maintain its configuration within an LDB database. Available configuration options for the Monitor will be:

  • Enabled/Disabled services

    • Arguments and options to be passed to the services

  • Number of retry attempts for failed service start

  • Service polling interval

    • Service polling failure tolerance

  • D-BUS monitor socket

For further detail, see the Configuration Store section below.

Service Control#

At startup, the Monitor service will fork off each of the enabled SSSD services into their own, managed child process. Each child process will connect via private D-BUS communication to the configured D-BUS monitor socket. The monitor service will then challenge the client connection to identify itself by service name and version.

If the child service goes down (see Service Monitoring), the Monitor service will attempt to restart the service with the arguments and options specified in the configuration database.

If the configuration of a client service changes, the Monitor will send a private D-BUS message to the process, triggering a service update. This may be an alteration of a particular option to the service, or it may trigger the service to shut down completely.

Service Monitoring#

The child services will be monitored in two ways.

  1. At a configured interval, the client service will be challenged with a simple ping. If the service fails to respond to the configured number of pings (the failure tolerance), it will be marked as crashed/hung and restarted by the Service Control.

  2. All SSSD services will maintain a connection to the Monitor over the private D-BUS socket. If the service crashes or is killed without the Service Manager’s knowledge, this communication will be broken and the Monitor will immediately attempt to relaunch the affected service.

Appendix#

Configuration Store#

The configuration store can will be represented by LDB which give a flexibility of the memory mapped LDAP. The structure of the configuration store will be represented thusly:

cn=config
|
----cn=services,cn=config
    |
    ----cn=monitor,cn=services,cn=config
    |   dbusSocket: /var/lib/sss/dbus/monitor
    |   ActiveServices: nss, pam
    |
    ----cn=nss,cn=services,cn=config
    |   unixSocket: /var/lib/sss/pipes/nss
    |
    ----cn=pam,cn=services,cn=config
        unixSocket: /var/lib/sss/pipes/pam

Further configuration options pending.

D-BUS Methods#

Services#

The following D-BUS methods shall be exposed by all SSSD services managed by the Monitor:

getIdentity

INPUT: OUTPUT: STRING name, UINT16 version

ping

INPUT: OUTPUT:

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