Server Spin

Jeroen van Meeuwen kanarip at kanarip.com
Tue Jan 20 09:10:40 UTC 2009


David Huff wrote:
> One of the biggest areas of overlap between the server sig and thincrust 
> is in a minimum package set definition that can be extended for 
> different needs/applications.
> 
> Thincrust already includes an official Fedora spin, the AOS, which is 
> hosted in the "spin kickstart pool"[1].   The AOS is basically a 
> kickstart file describing a minimal appliance OS that includes: the 
> kernel, yum, dns, grub, and se-linux, all working on start-up.
> 
> The first cut of the AOS was built by removing everything, ie. not 
> including core or base, and adding the packages we needed.  We also 
> tired to exclude extra packages that got brought in as deps. This 
> produces an disk image of 140 packages and is ~360M.
> 
> While I am not saying this is the prettiest and/or the best approach, it 
> was a quick way of producing a working appliance definition with a 
> relatively small foot print using the current tools.
> 
> Ideally any "Server spin" would be extensions of this minimum OS 
> definition.  I would love to see the the AOS definition evolve to become 
> a better and smaller minimum OS definition.
> 

While I'm not disagreeing, why not create "single CD install media" with 
an option (in the isolinux.cfg menu) to have the minimum (working) set 
of packages be installed, and the rest of the installation menu 
interactive (partitioning, root password)?

Bearing in mind that the Fedora Project already releases CDs, and that 
I've fixed package ordering, the simplest win would be to add the menu 
entry to the isolinux.cfg, and include one kickstart file on the disk 
with just a %packages section.

A user would still be able to run the normal installation procedure, or 
supply a different kickstart on the cmdline (including the %packages 
kickstart on the cdrom?) for full automation.

Just a thought Fedora Unity has been pondering on, at popular demand. 
I'm as far as getting Revisor into shape to do the job.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip



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