"Stateless Linux" project

Miles Sabin miles at milessabin.com
Mon Sep 13 20:36:35 UTC 2004


Havoc Pennington wrote,
> Appreciate feedback, especially from anyone who has time to try out
> the HOWTO. We expect the code to change quite a bit as issues and
> suggestions come in.

I think this is a fine idea. I have a few questions tho' ...

Outside of largish corporates where clones are common, there are smaller 
environments where machines are mostly (95%+, say) similar, but where 
there are machine-by-machine variations which fall outside the set of 
things which are covered by per-user homes or hardware auto- 
configuration. For instance, differences in which services should be 
running, their configuration, or minor kernel tweaks. Are such 
environments outside the scope of this proposal, or is there some plan 
to support per-machine or per-group/class deltas from a common 
baseline?

One thing that's always stopped me from bothering with NFS mounted homes 
is that for me a different machine quite often implies a different 
role, hence that the stuff that's appropriate to be in my home varies. 
This also tends to be a delta from a common baseline, so handling the 
variability by having distinct users for each role doesn't seem like 
quite the right answer. Caching doesn't seem likely to change this, and 
the "recreate Joe's workstation" scenario in the document seems to 
wander into this kind of territory. Do you have any thoughts about 
handling this?

Slightly related to the previous two questions ... My laptop moves 
between my home network, my work network, business-client networks, 
connected by dialup ISP, and disconnected. In each scenario the 
services running, their configuration, and what's appropriate for my 
home dir vary slightly. Even tho' this is pretty clearly beyond the 
scope of your proposal, there seems to be at least something in common: 
the setup is mostly the same, but there are some small deltas. Would it 
make sense to have a common mechanism to handle this?

I think all my questions boil down to: looks great for the 95% of stuff 
which stays the same, but how do you deal with the 5% of stuff which 
varies? And can you do it in a way which is 95% less hassle than 
treating the machines as completely separate entities?

Cheers,


Miles





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