XML Transport

External programs can use the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP – RFC 3920) to communicate with the Logical Domains Manager. XMPP is supported for both local and remote connections and is on by default. To shut off a remote connection, set the ldmd/xmpp_enable SMF property to false and restart the Logical Domains Manager.

# svcadm disable ldmd
# svccfg -s ldom/ldmd setprop ldmd/xmpp_enabled=false
# svcadm refresh ldmd
# svcadm enable ldmd

XMPP Server

The Logical Domains Manager implements an XMPP server which can communicate with numerous available XMPP client applications and libraries. The LDoms Manager uses the following security mechanisms:

• Transport Layer Security (TLS) to secure the communication channel between the client and itself.

• Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) for authentication. PLAIN is the only SASL mechanism supported. You must send in a user name and password to the server, so it can authorize you before allowing monitoring or management operations.

Local Connections

The LDoms Manager detects whether user clients are running on the same domain as itself and, if so, does a minimal XMPP handshake with that client. Specifically, the SASL authentication step after the setup of a secure channel through TLS is skipped. Authentication and authorization are done based on the credentials of the process implementing the client interface.

Clients can choose to implement a full XMPP client or to simply run a streaming XML parser, such as the libxml2 Simple API for XML (SAX) parser. Either way the client has to handle an XMPP handshake to the point of TLS negotiation. Refer to the XMPP specification for the sequence needed.