RFC Fedora 23 Change idea

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Mon, 2015-05-25 at 18:44 -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was thinking today that for Fedora 23 it would really cool to 
> deliver a NAS 
> version of Fedora 23. I could see it being delivered in 2 formats. 
> 
> 1 an atomic based disk image. it could be preinstalled, you dd the 
> image onto 
> a disk or a usb stick plug it in and boot, you could use initial
> -setup to set 
> a root password, set timezone etc, then use cockpit to manage and 
> configure.  
> my thought here is that you could use a mirco-atx system with 4 or 6 
> sata 
> ports and you use all the disks for data and boot and run the system 
> from a 
> small piece of media, 16 or 32G usb stick for instance. or even a 
> beaglebone 
> black or similar arm based device with a attached usb disk 
> 
> 2 as a option you can select on a regular install. 
> 
> The roles would be iscsi( or some other block device), nfs, smb/cifs. 
> all 
> managed and configured using cockpit, a user could carve up the 
> attached disk, 
> be able to alloacte nfs or smb/cifs or export some raw space as a 
> block 
> device, for use in vms etc.
> 
> I know it is a pretty rough outline but figured I would get something 
> out and 
> some discussion to see if what others thought.  I think especially 
> the atomic 
> version could be really useful. a very simple way to get some storage 
> up and 
> running and use and keep it updated. especially long term, since 
> going from 
> Fedora 23 to 24 should be a simple atomic update.

The atomic-based one is an interesting idea, but it's a pretty crowded
space. For example, I've got a Synology D214 at home that is basically
this exact idea in a relatively cheap (and low-power) case. It's even
built atop Linux and open-source[1] (though the UI is not).

So I'm not sure it's necessarily a good use of our effort to move into
a space that already has a strong player (at least for F23). I do
however think that there is a lot to be gained by building up a
powerful user experience for doing file-sharing in Fedora Server. I'm
not sure we want to tackle all of the possibilities at once though; it
might be prudent to hit at most one or two of the most valuable ones
first. In my mind, that would be SMB and/or NFS for the first pass.
(And unless we have a lot of people excited about working on it, we
should really pick just one; probably SMB).

One thing we can and should do with Fedora Server is tie the access
-control and authorization decisions in with our domain controller
role. I think we can make it possible to set up simple
username/password-based shares, but managing authorization decisions
using FreeIPA HBAC (and possibly AD GPO down the road, but not for the
first pass) would be very valuable.

If we choose to work on NFS, we should set up a simple mechanism to
accommodate two popular uses:
 * Kerberized NFSv4 working with the domain controller
 * NFS home-directories

If we choose to work on SMB, we need to make sure that we can
interoperate cleanly with Active Directory domains as well as FreeIPA
-Active Directory cross-realm trusts.

So let's discuss this at length during the meeting today.


[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl/files/?source=navbar
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