What is the Configuration Agent, and how does it work?

The Configuration Agent is a policy caching and delivery application. It was designed and built to ensure that desktop client applications could be centrally configured without significant impact to the performance of these applications and the hosts they run on. This is achieved by:

• Caching any downloaded policy in a locally available cache for future client use

• Sharing any expensive resources (for example, connections to an LDAP server where policy is hosted ) that can and should be shared

The typical scenario where interaction occurs between client applications and the Configuration Agent is extremely simple and can be described as follows:

1. A user launches one of the relevant desktop client applications ( gconfd, Mozilla or StarOffice )

2. The client application connects to the Configuration Agent

3. The client application requests policy data that it needs from the Configuration Agent

4. The Configuration Agent searches its cache for the requested policy data

5. If the policy data is not found in the cache, the Configuration Agent downloads the required data from a pre configured policy repository and stores it in the cache

6. The policy data is sent to the requesting client application

7. The Configuration Agent monitors the policy repository for any modifications to policy data

8. If a modification is detected, the Configuration Agent refreshes its cache so that it is up to date and informs the client application of the modification.