"Stateless Linux" project

Carwyn Edwards carwyn at carwyn.com
Thu Sep 23 22:46:44 UTC 2004


Josh England wrote:
>making administration of a large
> group of machines a natural extension of administering a single machine
> without the need for a configuration language.

[Devil's advocate mode.]

While this is good in terms of teaching existing sysadmins to use 
OneSiS, the single language model allows less skilled staff (front line 
support in our case) to edit a single common format that they understand 
and have the agents do the hard part of understanting dhcpd.conf, DNS 
zone files or sendmail.cf (yes you can get impedence mismatches).

Making a GUI that can then edit this single declarative language is then 
significantly simpler than one per format. The agents only need to write 
the native per daemon/application config files with a template engine. 
The read phase to show the user the current state of the configuration 
data comes from the profile that's in the single declarative language.

(Yes this means that you can't jump in and edit the native files by 
hand, yes it's annoying at times).

Metadata in the schema details for a component could even be used to 
triger daemon specific help (or even GUI layout) in the GUI (no we don't 
have one that does this yet but it could be done).

In the end it depends what you are trying to do. Existing sysadmins will 
probably like the OneSiS model, new Sysadmins coming from something like 
Windows server admin might have a different view.

 > I believe oneSIS can be an excellent starting point to
> accomplish the goals of the "Stateless

 From what I can see there are maybe a handful of projects out there 
that have made significant progress in this area which is great. 
Hopefully the lessons learned from each project can be carried forward. 
I certainly think this is an area were different options and approaches 
is very imporant. Vendor lockin to configuration engines/methods is 
horrible.

Carwyn





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