Smolt and software information

[nodata]

Am Freitag, den 09.11.2007, 11:29 -0500 schrieb Yaakov Nemoy:
> Hey list,
> 
> There's been a bit of conversation lately in #smolt about collecting
> information about partitioning, hard drive sizes, and most
> importantly, file system types.  I feel it might be just a touch out
> of scope for smolt, since so far our policy has been hardware only.
> The reason this appeals to me the most is if there is any interest in
> file system type used, this would be a good place to collect those
> statistics.  Personally, when we go make changes to the 'smolt
> protocol', we'll leave out the mount point used, so no one knows how
> big any given partition is on a particular machine.  I have two
> questions for everyone.
> 
> 1) Is this useful?  Is this something that we feel the community would
> like to see, and that it isn't something that is deserving of a second
> statistics aggregator (like a popularity contest for packages would
> be)
> 
> 2) Are there any privacy concerns?  Remember smolt is voluntary, and

A loaded question!

> so far we don't link any information to machines other than a single
> UUID that is privately stored.

Privately stored, but not under any form of access control. Smolt lets
the non-admin of a box submit a smolt profile.

Besides, didn't RHN do this? Wasn't one of the reasons for Satellite
server being invented because people don't want their own servers giving
out this kind of information? If yes, then the same reasons apply to
smolt.

Sometimes it *is* useful to give out a smolt UUID to let someone (e.g. a
kernel developer) get at hardware information for a bug report. That's
okay. If you then "extended" smolt to give out more information (it
won't stop here btw), then some of those people won't provide that
information any more, unless they can choose which information they
send.

>   Mainly, the implementation will
> probably be just simply parsing through /etc/fstab.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any input you all are willing to share.
> 
> Cheers,
> Yaakov
>