RFC for Smolt features

[Yaakov Nemoy]

On Dec 13, 2007 6:58 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> What I would like is a better plugin system into the smolt and smoon
> server. There are a ton of privacy concerns that come up everytime
> this project comes up with "who has the data", "I want to be counted
> by why the hell do you need to know my CPU unless I am filling in a
> bug report", etc.. While some of these people do were tin (not
> Aluminum) hats, there are people who do have legitimate reasons for
> the questions (I just tend to forget them.)
>
> So here is what I would like to see smolt/smoon do.
>
> 1) Smolt by itself collects a certain amount of data that is known,
> documented and clear. It is the minimum amount of data that would help
> the various distros and desktops to get sample data.
> 2) Smolt allows for seperate packages to be installed that collect
> additional data. This would allow for a disk-layout plugin, a
> deep-hardware plugin, a group plugin etc to be written and used by the
> people who need it or want to share it, etc. It would allow for
> someone to write an Selinux audit plugin that might be useful for a
> particular site but not something you would want to have enabled or
> pushed out from the central Smolt servers.

I had a simpler solution, which is on my TODO list for Fedora 9.
Every field in Smolt (the client) is controlled by a boolean, that is
what allows it to be sent out.  There will be a well published default
config (see the privacy policy for that list, which actually sends you
off to the "Scope" document.) that is standard on standard Fedora
builds.  These standard builds also submit to the standard server.
The server is also configurable.

If an organisation wants to run a Smoon server, they can configure all
their clients to submit information to there.  The smoon server will
then be able to export its information to another server, or our
server.  Again, through a series of booleans, the server can be
configured to only send specific information.  The default
configuration on Smoon is the same as Smolt.

-Yaakov