Server SIG - work areas

David Huff dhuff at redhat.com
Mon Jan 5 19:37:34 UTC 2009


 > From dan at danny.cz  Mon Dec  1 14:05:39 2008
 > From: dan at danny.cz (Dan =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hor=E1k?=)
 > Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:05:39 +0100
 > Subject: Server SIG - work areas
 > Message-ID: <1228140339.3664.75.camel at eagle.danny.cz>
 >
 > Hello,

Sorry for replying to an old thread however I am just now catching up on 
the discussions from this list.  My first impression is that there looks 
to be a lot in common with the server sig and the "thincrust" project, 
www.thincrust.org.  We are still in the early stages of the thincrust 
project, however some of the things we have been working on are:

1. Light weight base OS = AOS, currently a fedora spin
2. Tool to build reproducible appliance images form kickstart files, 
appliance-creator, see the tooling section or the appliance-tools rpm.
3. Best practices and tools for post install setup for "appliances", we 
are currently using puppet, see the "ACE" section of the web site.

Please check out the site and let us know if there any questions or 
feedback.

One of the next steps for thincurst is to redefine the AOS package set 
to make it smaller, more fine gained, and more reusable/extendible, 
which seems to similar to some of the goals of the server list.

more comments below....

> 
> it has been some time when the Server SIG was announced. And one goal
> has been already almost accomplished - to start discussion about the
> needs of the server community. For "Server" specific issues I have
> opened our own mailing list - subscribe at
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-server-list
> 
> One question raised during the discussions was "what is a server" and
> the answer can be simple. The server is a combination of bootloader,
> kernel and "the server", where "the server" can be a file server, web
> server, database server, application server, etc. It is quite common to
> have just one service running per hardware (both physical and virtual).
> But a mix of running servers is also possible :-)

We have a similar definition for an appliance.

> 
> There are miscellaneous goals written on the wiki page, so it is time to
> get them a little bit organized and to divide the work into more
> specific areas. And they are here:
> 
> Installer
>  - work with the anaconda team to keep anaconda suitable for server
> installs (text mode, kickstarts, ...)
>  - create a lightweight installer/bootstraper

see the appliance-creator, http://thincrust.net/tooling.html

> 
> Server services
>  - bring more server packages into Fedora
>  - encourage creation of EPEL branches for existing packages
> 
> Kernel
>  - everything about the kernel side of servers

We have not done anything here, however we have discussed pulling out 
some kernel modules that are not needed for virtual appliances.  There 
is not an easy way of doing this without "breaking" rpm, current 
thinking is to use white/black listing of actual files.

> 
> Admins corner
>  - place for administration and monitoring technologies available in
> Fedora
>  - collects pointers to how-tos and other docs useful for administrators
>  - work on the TUI counterparts of GUI system-config-* tools, should go
> in hand with the backend/frontend separation

See: http://thincrust.net/ace-console.html
> 
> Security
>  - improve/monitor the security standards for current server software
>  - help the desktop developers with the security aspects of their work
> 
> QA
>  - testing
> 



Comments and suggestions welcome.....

-D




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