[Matahari] Matahari Project status
Zane Bitter
zbitter at redhat.com
Mon Sep 3 12:42:19 UTC 2012
As will be evident to those of you who have been subscribed to this list
for a while, I am not working on Matahari and nor is anybody else at Red
Hat. There are no plans to put any more work into the project.
The primary reason for this is the lack of end-to-end authentication in
the Matahari architecture. Conversations with colleagues and potential
users alike have repeatedly shown that the access control and auditing
capabilities that this would allow are essential to adoption. However,
the effort required to retrofit it into QMF is prohibitive.
As I understand it (this was well before my time), the project began as
a proof-of-concept for an RPC messaging system, presumably with the idea
that a security model could be bolted on later. Based on lessons learned
from Matahari, I would recommend that anybody undertaking a similar
endeavour begin with a proof-of-concept of a security model that is easy
to configure and bolt on RPC later. Security is the _core_ problem in a
remote management system.
Sadly, I am not aware of any remote management frameworks that replicate
the bus architecture of Matahari. Thanks largely to the Web, we live in
very much a client-server world, and it may be some years before the
pendulum begins to swing back. In the meantime, I expect that system
configuration tools (such as Puppet and Chef) that rely on pull rather
than push will continue to be prominent.
Fedora users may wish to checkout cura: https://fedorahosted.org/cura/
If anybody wishes to continue development on Matahari they are, of
course, quite welcome to do so (subject to the existing GPLv2+ licence),
and I will be happy to assist with the transition. The mailing list will
remain available until I get sick of dealing with the daily spam
filtering ;)
regards,
Zane.
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