devel September 2004

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251 participants
243 discussions

"Stateless Linux" project
by Stuart Ellis 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

I'm absolutely delighted by this - I'd long since given up hope of a mainstream vendor looking at a cached client approach rather than trying to insist on either thick or thin. The issue of backing up user home directories from mobile devices in mentioned in the PDF, but I'd be very interested in hearing about approaches for dealing with syncing shared data stores. With a home directory or private data store basic sync works if it can be made transparent to the user, and/or integrated into the GUI (Off-line Files on MS Windows, Mac iDisk). Writable shared data stores presumably require some form of reconciliation or version control for multiple off-line copies to be handled smoothly. I suppose that one solution might be to wrap access to a version control system into the standard GUI so that the functionality becomes accessible to office workers; another might be to use a database-backed system like Storage, which could replicate. How are people dealing with this issue on their networks now ? What do we think would be the "Just Works" solution in the context of Stateless Linux ? (I've seen the problem, but I don't know the answer...) -- Stuart Ellis s.ellis(a)fastmail.co.uk

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Stateless Linux -- HTML version of the PDF intro
by William Merriam's most spammed mbox 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

I realize it's a bit late, but here's an HTML version of the introduction, StatelessLinux.pdf, which Havoc Pennington referred to at the start of the Stateless Linux project thread. http://citethisbook.net/Red_Hat_Introduction_to_Stateless_Linux.html Something unusual about the original PDF prevents copying and pasting in xpdf and, I hear, even in Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 under windows. The problem also affects xpdf-utils, causing pdftotext to print garbage.

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Re: Homedir backup (was Re: "Stateless Linux" project)
by Bryan K. Wright 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

otaylor(a)redhat.com said: > The question in my mind is: > If you never have a high bandwidth connection to the backup server, > does the automatic homedir backup concept make sense? It may make sense with something like rsync, using its --partial and --compare-dest options. See the following from the rsync documentation: --compare-dest=DIR This option instructs rsync to use DIR on the des tination machine as an additional directory to com pare destination files against when doing transfers if the files are missing in the destination direc tory. This is useful for doing transfers to a new destination while leaving existing files intact, and then doing a flash-cutover when all files have been successfully transferred (for example by mov ing directories around and removing the old direc tory, although this skips files that haven´t changed; see also --link-dest). This option increases the usefulness of --partial because par tially transferred files will remain in the new temporary destination until they have a chance to be completed. If DIR is a relative path, it is relative to the destination directory. You could use these features to synchronize files as much as possible (even partial file transfers) over a slow link, without damaging the "last known good" version. When a complete, newer version has been trasferred, it can be dropped in place of the previous "known good" version. Bryan -- =============================================================================== Bryan Wright |"If you take cranberries and stew them like Physics Department | applesauce, they taste much more like prunes University of Virginia | than rhubarb does." -- Groucho Charlottesville, VA 22901 | (434) 924-7218 | bryan(a)virginia.edu ===============================================================================

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Outage Notice
by seth vidal 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

Hi All, The Physics Department of Duke University will have a site-wide power outage for 8 hours on Friday Sept 17th from 6PM(1800) until 2AM(0200) Saturday Sept 18th. This affects: * fedora.linux.duke.edu * fedoraproject.org * www.linux.duke.edu * lists.linux.duke.edu * potentially: mirror.linux.duke.edu (depending on dns) * torrent.linux.duke.edu Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your enemies, just don't come complaining to me that you weren't warned. -sv

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RFC: cleaning up updates and updates-testing
by Bill Nottingham 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

At the moment, the Fedora updates tree is somewhat out of hand (look, wow - 27G). Does anyone have any specific and concrete objections to removing older, superceded, updates? Bill

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clean up updates/testing
by Farkas Levente 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

hi, is there any reason why outdated rpms are in updates/testing/ directory? eg: in http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/2/i… kernel and xorg-x11 packages? imho it'd be useful to delete them since they are very confusing now. just my 2c. yours. -- Levente "Si vis pacem para bellum!"

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how about oneSIS? was: "Stateless Linux" project
by Josh England 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

Hello all, I'd like to introduce to the list a piece of software that just happens to do exactly what this project sounds like its trying to accomplish. The software handles the root image of any number of nodes, but allows for node/role specific behavior. It allows you to deploy a local cache of the root image onto a local disk, and a bootloader if desired. No matter what, though, the root filesystem is bit-for-bit identical everywhere. Deviations are handled by creating soft links to/from a tmpfs ramdisk. It really gives ultimate flexibility as to how/where components of the filesystem should live (localdisk/ramdisk/NFS). It can bootstrap the traditional NFSroot way (root=/dev/nfs) or use an initrd to bootstrap in any number of creative ways. The framework is in place to be able to easily boot over any network filesystem (including Lustre when it arrives), or over any network medium (including InfiniBand). It uses an initrd 'template' to create new initrds with very customizable behavior. The project is called oneSIS (http://onesis.sourceforge.net). We've used it in production for running clusters for years, but I've just recently (early this year) re-written it from scratch to make it cleaner and more flexible. Grab the CVS version from sourceforge and check it out. It makes everything the "Stateless linux" project is trying to do very, very easy. There is more information in the oneSIS software manual (http://onesis.sourceforge.net/oneSIS-manual.pdf), and I currently have a paper being reviewed for submission, or I'd send it also. -JE ----------------------------------------------- Josh England Sandia National Laboratory, Livermore, CA Visualization and Scientific Computing email: jjengla(a)sandia.gov phone: (925) 294-2076 Miles Sabin wrote, I think this is a fine idea. I have a few questions tho' ... Outside of largish corporates where clones are common, there are smaller environments where machines are mostly (95%+, say) similar, but where there are machine-by-machine variations which fall outside the set of things which are covered by per-user homes or hardware auto- configuration. For instance, differences in which services should be running, their configuration, or minor kernel tweaks. Are such environments outside the scope of this proposal, or is there some plan to support per-machine or per-group/class deltas from a common baseline? One thing that's always stopped me from bothering with NFS mounted homes is that for me a different machine quite often implies a different role, hence that the stuff that's appropriate to be in my home varies. This also tends to be a delta from a common baseline, so handling the variability by having distinct users for each role doesn't seem like quite the right answer. Caching doesn't seem likely to change this, and the "recreate Joe's workstation" scenario in the document seems to wander into this kind of territory. Do you have any thoughts about handling this? Slightly related to the previous two questions ... My laptop moves between my home network, my work network, business-client networks, connected by dialup ISP, and disconnected. In each scenario the services running, their configuration, and what's appropriate for my home dir vary slightly. Even tho' this is pretty clearly beyond the scope of your proposal, there seems to be at least something in common: the setup is mostly the same, but there are some small deltas. Would it make sense to have a common mechanism to handle this? I think all my questions boil down to: looks great for the 95% of stuff which stays the same, but how do you deal with the 5% of stuff which varies? And can you do it in a way which is 95% less hassle than treating the machines as completely separate entities? Cheers, Miles

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glibc-2.3.3-51 breaks m4
by Steve G 15 Sep '04

15 Sep '04

Hi, The latest glibc in rawhide breaks the compile of m4: stackovf.c:108: warning: `__nothrow__' attribute ignored stackovf.c: In function `setup_stackovf_trap': stackovf.c:359: error: parse error before "__attribute__" make[1]: *** [stackovf.o] Error 1 make: *** [all] Error 1 This seems to be centered on the __P macro which is only used in stackovf.c. I have filed "glibc breaks the build" bug reports and they languish in bugzilla. Does someone involved in glibc know that m4 is now broken due to something in the headers? (glibc-2.3.3-45 works fine) Is glibc going to get fixed/reverted? Or is m4 going to be fixed? Thanks, -Steve Grubb __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

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RE: "Stateless Linux" project
by Erik LaBianca 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

> > Hi, > > Red Hat engineering is starting a new project we're calling > "stateless Linux" for lack of a better name - some components of this > are already in Rawhide, and others will be appearing shortly. > > Appreciate feedback, especially from anyone who has time to try out > the HOWTO. We expect the code to change quite a bit as issues and > suggestions come in. > > Havoc > I too am thrilled to see this happening. It's this sort of technology that has the potential to give linux a solid leg up on the competition for both the desktop and the server. I have a couple of questions. 1. Do I need to be running rawhide to test out the read-only root rpms and the HOWTO? 2. Configuration management. I've been trying to extract my configuration from running systems for a while now, but not really been entirely successful. Typically the list of files to "watch" gets unwieldy, or someone forgets to make the .orig file, or commit to cvs. I think ideally a configuration management system would integrate rpm (to know what files are config files) and cvs/subversion (to provide revision control) in such a way that you have revision controlled configuration files available off-system. In a truly stateless system, you could just export all the config files from CVS into the ramdisk on bootup. I'd REALLY like to be able to edit files on a "live" system, and type a command to "check in" my changes. I'd like to be able to use the same system to show my the change history for a given file, and to ease forward migration. Is this sort of thing within the scope of this project? 3. I'd like to recommend looking at including the linux-vserver [1] patches and tools with the OS distribution for server-side applications. All the aforementioned technology would be an ideal fit in virtual servers, and the ability to keep all your "logical servers" in virtual sandboxes makes testing and deployment in smaller environments much easier. Statelessness would make virtual servers far more efficient, since you could run them all off the same physical filesystem instead of making hard link trees. I'm already close to running "stateless servers" just by keeping them in virtual machines, where I can shut them down and rsync them to a different physical machine without leaving my desk. Thanks --erik [1] http://www.linux-vserver.net/

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Gnome 2.8 and menu editing
by dragoran 14 Sep '04

14 Sep '04

will menu editing be enabled in gnome2.8 /fc3 ? or is it still buggy?

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devel September 2004