[xen-tools] Re: difference between xen-shell and argo

[Henning Sprang]

On 12/3/06, Ward Vandewege <ward at pong.be> wrote:
> Eh? I think you missed quite a bit of what Steve's was trying to say.

Maybe I really need to look at both. Sorry for annoying you, but I
want to mention the tools on a conference talk and will probably not
have time for trying them...

> Argo is
> a tool that exposes information about a dom0, and allows actions on a dom0.
> It is designed to be scriptable.
> Xen-shell is a *user* tool. Argo is an *admin* tool.
>I use Argo to manage
> *many* dom0s. Xen-shell is what one would give to a user that has one or a
> couple of domUs. It's a 'shell' environment. It doesn't require another tool
> to interface with it.

But xen-shell functions are a subset of argo functions (-> argo has
most xen-shell functions, plus some more). And both need to be
installed in some way on each dom0 host, and can be accessed in some
way remotely from there - the one via ssh shell, the other via the rgo
protocol.

So, access-style is different, and software-development wise it's just
a matter of managing permissions for specific roles - having a user
and an admin role is a quite typical use of
authorization/authentication management, and allowing the user of a
software to access a dom0/domU based on some acces control list is
also what's in the scope of the tasks of the software layer
responsible for these things - permission management.

E.G.; has user X the permission to only act on domU a, or on domU a,
b, d, or on dom0 a and all domU's on dom0 c... something like that.

> Basically, argo acts more like a library - very useful but you need something
> to interface with it. Xen-shell is an application.

Hmm, maybe I start getting it - is this in the sense that argo
basically has no function of it's own but is mainly a the protocol
that is documented on the website?
E.G. other than I thought that argo implements some stuff that
xen.shell also already has, it is merely using other tools, for
example, argo would even actually call xen-shell for all the
functionality it provides?

But then - why argo, and what's the difference between argo, xend
xml-rpc and libvirt?
(no criticism, everybody can to do what he wants, I am just curious
about motivations and differences between these three)

Henning