Re: announcing the Gentoo Server Project

On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 03:48, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> In chatting with Wade, we talked about how best to organize the new project
> to ensure that all areas are covered.  I suggested that we organize it by
> function, which would mean categories like:
> 
> * installation
> * configuration
> * administration
> * documentation
> 
> Those are simply example categories.  The goal is to ensure that all
> *major* aspects of running Gentoo in a server environment are accounted
> for.  

Before anything else, just wanted to say that this is a project I have
been looking for since I started with Gentoo more than a year ago, and I
am sure there are many people watching this very closely. Unfortunately
some of us don't have spare time to spend on helping projects, but that
doesn't mean that we don't support it, to the contrary we are anxious to
see what comes out of this. So if you don't see a lot of feedback, it
doesn't mean there is little interest, keep up the good work.

Just wanted to mention the security aspect, I know you said that these
are example categories, but then we also have the Gentoo-Hardened
project. So it would be interesting to see how can this project and
Gentoo-Hardened go hand in hand so that the user can use both at the
same time seamlessly. Even better would be to somehow "merge" these two
projects, but that would be much more complicated.

I have joined this list lately, so I dont know if any of these ideas
have been discussed:

- Server profile: The idea is that all software installed is *stable* so
that if you "emerge -U openssh", you don't find yourself locked out of
the box next time you connect (this happened to me around a year ago -
due to a bug in openssh.ebuild). I am aware that this would be rather
hard to achieve for obvious reasons, but I think that this, or an idea
with a similar effect, is a must. Maybe this idea will be redundant with
the Gentoo QA increasing in quality and with the new portage 2.

- Central host manager: where a central server contains enough
information to know what package with what use flags is installed in
each host along with the rest of the configurations. (I believe this has
been discussed). There are zillions of way to accomplish this.

- Security updates: I think this is a must, "emerge security".

- Keyword based server building: (I believe this has also been
discussed) - It would be interesting to achieve this so that most
combinations of popular and not so popluar software can be built with a
few keywords *or* with just one keyword such as
"courier-imap+postfix+userdb". Maybe a way to manage this would be to
have "server-combination" maintainers. So for example there would be a
maintainer for "courier-imap + postfix + procmail", another for "cyrus +
sendmail", etc, basically maintainers for combinations of server
software. Obviously there are a lot of combinations, but if the popular
ones are maintained, it would be very interesting. Again, if the Gentoo
QA gets better and with portage 2 (reverse dependencies etc) maybe this
idea is also redundant.

- Server GRPs: Just imagine having a reference platform on a CD (or ftp
etc...) where you can install a server stage3 right away and then
install server-combination binaries with right configurations of course.
Finally a script would configure the whole combination step by step (or
even a guide would be great). You could have any popular combination
server(s) running in minutes. I suspect this has also been discussed
here.

- Remote portage: This last one is an idea for making production servers
to be given away to clients, where you can remove portage and gcc
altogether, mainly for security reasons(gcc), and hopefully bz2 packages
can be installed with a cut down minimum portage, or the portage info
can be kept in a central server (distributed portage?). Of course it
would be interesting for the mechanism to allow the admin to add
portage/gcc to get it back to a normal Gentoo box.

Cheers,

-- 
Vano D <[email protected]>


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