4:48 p.m.
All,
At today's Fedora Server meeting on IRC, it was requested that we open a thread on the
Server mailing list to provide
use cases. This is my attempt to start that discussion.
Use Case #1:
A small site without an experienced Systems Administrator wishes to host their own email
server. This would normally
involve installing postfix, sendmail or some other Message Transfer Agent (MTA). It would
also normally involve
installing dovecot or some other Message Delivery Agent (MDA). While rpms exist for the
above services, the rpms
contain generic configuration files that require manual “tweaking” before the services
will work together as one unit.
One potential server-ansible-role might install the postfix rpm. Another server-ansible
role might install the sendmail
rpm. Yet another rpm might install the dovecot rpm. A yet-to-be-developed
server-ansible-role might configure postfix
and dovecot to work together. A second yet-to-be developed server-ansible-role might
configure sendmail and dovecot to
work together.
The site may wish to only allow for secure transmissions between the MTA and the sending
User Agent (UA) as well as
between the MDA and the UA. That would involve installing the the certbot rpm, requesting
the necessary certificates
from the Letsencrypt CA, and configuring the MTA and MDA configuration files to provide
secure transmissions. A server-
ansible-role could do all of this assuming the MTA was postfix and another
server-ansible-role could do all of this
assuming the MTA was sendmail.
The site may wish to implement Spamassassin, Clamav, DKIM, DMARC and SPF in a matter
similar to that described above.
Other possibilities include configuring the MTA and MDA to host multiple virtual domains
and/or virtual users. This
would require installing an RPM for a database of choice and making all the necessary
configuration file changes
required to integrate it into the sites MTA/MDA infrastructure.
For a site considering migration from other OS’s to Fedora, completing this process could
take days if not weeks. With
all the old and outdated documentation on the web, it almost becomes a trial and error
situation. With carefully
crafted server-ansible-roles, it should be a matter of instructions on how to access the
server-ansible-roles repository
and providing well-documented defaults/main.yml and vars/main.yml files. The unfamiliar
Systems Administrator then only
needs to provide the site-specific values in the Ansible variables files.
Use Case #2:
In reality, I suppose this is just a variation on Use Case #1.
The site wishes to host dhcp, dns and other network management related services locally.
The site also might wish to
use dnssec to help with network security and integrity. I know that DNS over HTTPS (DoH)
vs DNS over TLS (DoT) is
somewhat controversial, but configuration of these options could be provided by
server-ansible-roles.
My network-foo is not strong enough to know if/how Unbound fit into the picture. But
again with the proper server-
ansible-roles, it should be able to integrate into this architecture.
Use Case #3:
Again, this might just be a variation on Use Case #1.
Radicale is a program that will synchronize calendars, contacts, and to-do lists between
applications that support
CalDAV, CardDAV and http. It allows a user to keep this information in sync between a
desktop, laptop and/or a smart
phone on linux, windows and ios. It involves installing rpms for radicale, (apache or
nginx), and most-likely git (for
version control of the data files). Configurations for radicale and the web server need
to be altered according to user
preferences. Such configuration changes include things like authentication, reverse
proxy, wsgi, rights management,
etc. Hopefully, two server-ansible-roles would perform all the necessary configuration
changes (one role for apache
and another for nginx).
Use Case #4:
If we wanted to be real ambitious, a role for installing and configuring Wildfly (or any
other large complex piece of
software). It could be installed via the provider’s installation method which would
probably include software installed
in /opt that are specific to the individual application. Or we could perhaps develop
server-ansible-roles to download
all the individual component pieces, package them into rpms, submit them to the Fedora
Packaging processes for inclusion
into basic fedora.
I would envision continuing using rpm packages (not coprs and not flatpacks) for basic
software installation. I would
envision a git-like repository maintained by the Fedora Server working group (along with
other stakeholders) to provide
the server-ansible-roles necessary to integrate all of the pieces together. The key to
making all of this work is good,
user-focused, up-to-date documentation on the wiki, web site and in the
server-ansible-roles.
Let the conversation begin.