[systemd-devel] dbus-broker can be used for a "user" type bus accessible over tcp or not?

[Erik Slagter]

Hi Lennart,

That is exactly the answer I expected, if only because apparently 
systemd does it exactly that ;-)

But not everything needs to be enterprise-grade. This is going to run 
inside my own house in a piece of network that's completely trusted. I 
can completely imagine it's not sane to do this with the system or even 
session bus, but this is a very simple "request value x for me" 
mechanism, on it's own bus.

It's now running on SUN RPC (with just as little security), but I fear 
that one has had it's longest time, being around for > 30 years and I am 
getting the feeling support is fading. It's also not great to develop 
for. I had a quick look at SOAP but support in C++ seems to be next to 
non-existing and needs a web server. Latest hot stuff seems to be gRPC 
but it's overly complicated and bloated. So I'd like to with DBus which 
happily does what I need.

So that's the story behind my considerations.

BTW using Fedora I cannot find the sd-bus library (+ devel) as a 
package. What's it called? I am now using libdbus.

On 20-01-2025 22:01, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mo, 20.01.25 18:53, Erik Slagter (erik at slagter.name) wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am trying to have a remotely accessible dbus. I'd love to discuss all
>> considerations, but for the moment let's just assume I need it.
> 
> Sorry, but letting D-Bus listen on TCP is a terrible idea, there's not
> sane authentication let alone encryption. It's not built for
> that.
> 
> If you want remoting, then connect to a remote bus via ssh, systemd's
> sd-bus makes that reasonably easy. See sd_bus_open_system_remote().
> 
> But please, don't do unencrypted D-Bus remotely.
> 
> xLennart
> 
> --
> Lennart Poettering, Berlin