From dan at danny.cz Mon Dec 1 14:05:39 2008
From: dan at danny.cz (Dan =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hor=E1k?=)
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:05:39 +0100
Subject: Server SIG - work areas
Message-ID: <1228140339.3664.75.camel(a)eagle.danny.cz>
Hello,
Sorry for replying to an old thread however I am just now catching up on
the discussions from this list. My first impression is that there looks
to be a lot in common with the server sig and the "thincrust" project,
www.thincrust.org. We are still in the early stages of the thincrust
project, however some of the things we have been working on are:
1. Light weight base OS = AOS, currently a fedora spin
2. Tool to build reproducible appliance images form kickstart files,
appliance-creator, see the tooling section or the appliance-tools rpm.
3. Best practices and tools for post install setup for "appliances", we
are currently using puppet, see the "ACE" section of the web site.
Please check out the site and let us know if there any questions or
feedback.
One of the next steps for thincurst is to redefine the AOS package set
to make it smaller, more fine gained, and more reusable/extendible,
which seems to similar to some of the goals of the server list.
more comments below....
it has been some time when the Server SIG was announced. And one goal
has been already almost accomplished - to start discussion about the
needs of the server community. For "Server" specific issues I have
opened our own mailing list - subscribe at
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-server-list
One question raised during the discussions was "what is a server" and
the answer can be simple. The server is a combination of bootloader,
kernel and "the server", where "the server" can be a file server,
web
server, database server, application server, etc. It is quite common to
have just one service running per hardware (both physical and virtual).
But a mix of running servers is also possible :-)
We have a similar definition for an appliance.
There are miscellaneous goals written on the wiki page, so it is time to
get them a little bit organized and to divide the work into more
specific areas. And they are here:
Installer
- work with the anaconda team to keep anaconda suitable for server
installs (text mode, kickstarts, ...)
- create a lightweight installer/bootstraper
see the appliance-creator,
http://thincrust.net/tooling.html
Server services
- bring more server packages into Fedora
- encourage creation of EPEL branches for existing packages
Kernel
- everything about the kernel side of servers
We have not done anything here, however we have discussed pulling out
some kernel modules that are not needed for virtual appliances. There
is not an easy way of doing this without "breaking" rpm, current
thinking is to use white/black listing of actual files.
Admins corner
- place for administration and monitoring technologies available in
Fedora
- collects pointers to how-tos and other docs useful for administrators
- work on the TUI counterparts of GUI system-config-* tools, should go
in hand with the backend/frontend separation
See:
http://thincrust.net/ace-console.html
Security
- improve/monitor the security standards for current server software
- help the desktop developers with the security aspects of their work
QA
- testing
Comments and suggestions welcome.....
-D