Emptytree Seedy Manual
Chapter 5 - Miscellaneous

5.1 Environment Options

HOME

The users home directory. Used to derive a configuration directory of the form HOME/.emptytree-seedy/<hostname>/, where <hostname> is the machines network node name derived from uname -n.

THING_CONFPATH

Overrides the default configuration directory.

THING_PWD

Overrides a configured password.

THING_SERVICEPORT

The service daemon listens by default to port 2222, this can be changed with this environment variable.

THING_USE_STORABLE

Performance can be tweaked somewhat by use of the Storable module for internal message passing. Set this environment variable to 1. Each host must have the same version of Storable installed. Check with:

     $ perl -MStorable -e 'print $Storable::VERSION, "\n";'

5.2 Security

An emptytree-seedy system consists of daemons that use a TCP network to exchange messages. These messages are signed with a shared password. Access to the user account running the system is conceivably reduced to access to this shared password. This password could be used to send messages to the daemons which could compromise the account.

If you are behind a firewall on a trusted network this might not bother you. If not you can set your system operation to untrusted mode. In this mode the Service daemon will not start any other daemons and will not write a configuration file. This however only makes compromising the user account harder not impossible.

5.3 Command Usage

     USAGE: $0 [options]
     Where options are:
     
       no options would start a Gtk
     
       --boot              Start and configure all things marked 'boot' in
                           the config file for this host, if no config file
                           exists only Thing::Service will be started.
     
       --start=<name>      Start and configure the thing configured with <name>.
     
       --type=<type>       Start a thing of type <type>.
     
       --kill              Shutdown all things.
     
       --pwd               Create or update the password file.
     
       --upgrade           Upgrade the configuration file.
     
       --install_config=<file> Install a configuration file into the appropriate
                           working directory for this host.
     
       --[no]trusted       Sets operation to trusted mode. Trusted mode is 
                           inherently insecure but simpler to configure. Default 
                           is untrusted i.e. --notrusted.
     
       --service_port=<xxxx> Modify the default service port.
     
       --[no]interact      Allow user prompting. Default is --interact.
     
       --[no]quiet         Only display error messages.
     
       --trace=<0-6>       Turn on copious debugging, for --start and
                           --type options this will be passed to the
                           started thing and trace information will appear
                           on the stdout.

Emptytree Seedy Manual