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Fedora Project Considering "Stateless Linux"
Havoc Pennington writes "Red Hat developers have been working on a generic framework covering all cases of sharing a single operating system install between multiple physical or virtual computers. This covers mounting the root filesystem diskless, keeping a read-only copy of it cached on a local disk, or storing it on a live CD, among other cases. Because OS configuration state is shared rather than local, the project is called 'stateless Linux.'
The post to fedora-devel-list is here, and a PDF overview is here."
Red Hat is doing quite well on bringing themselves down without anyone else's help.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I don't see the purpose. Maybe I'm just unitiated, but wouldn't a linux terminal server work better, or perhaps some other solution. This in particular doesn't look that amazing, but I could be wrong. Does anyone out there have specific uses for this? (TFA won't load for me, so I'm going on what I see)
Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
astro-turfing? is that like putting a midget on stilts?
Haven't Unix machine been doing this for years as NFS mounts? The first sun machines I used (sunos 4.1) has just a single install of the OS and two machines sharing a read only mount.
Stateless installs? Sounds a bit like the terminal server project. I smell thin clients...are they going into fashion again?
Thin clients WOULD be a blessing, I imagine. Single configuration, one update, all the "personal files" in a server somewhere -- makes for easy updating and backing up. Also keeps hardware requirements down...which [buzzword warning] "helps lower TCO and increase ROI"
Unless i've caught a large case of the stupids, it looks like we're heading back to the days of the mainframe computer which many terminals plug into. Is this good or bad or neutral? I think this is a good way to keep corporate/school/etc computer costs down while making sysadmin jobs at least a little easier.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
On behalf of non-geeks, let me be the first to say... HUH?
I mean, I know the words. It's mostly English, and that's my first language, and I'm pretty handy with computers, but that was the most incomprehensible load of babble I've heard since the last time I watched TNG.
Can someone explain what this means, in plain English, to a regular user (i.e. non-hacker geek types)?
Wow - this is really HUGE project. I mean - it spreads from kernel, through init scritps, through X managers & enviroments to easy to use administration tools. If they suceed this could be really "Linux killer application".
And please all the "NFS root is enough" posts - read the article!
News flash! Redhat is *paying* companies to generate a bunch of community hype around Fedora. This includes the many /. postings.
They're faking a grass roots movement around fedora, and that is astro-turfing. These tactics are not acceptable. Investigate before you choose a linux distro!
Redhat: the Redmond of linux.
It's really disconcerting for me that practically all the distros want you to have root access even to install a simple MP3 player from their package files; and extremely distrubing that they do it by popping up KDE or Gnome windows asking for root paswords.
Isn't this what we blame microsoft for?
Disk space is cheap enough, we don't need more sharing of config stuff - we need more separation so users can use the benefits of package managers without having to get in the way of other users.
This is similar to what clusters try and do. It is important to maintain the same OS state on all nodes. Take a look at Rocks Clusters. Rocks will push the same OS image out to the nodes of the cluster. There is no reason the cluster nodes could not be workstations on a desk.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
It's called "MS Terminal Services."
Posts like:
NFS read-only & shared root is enough
+
LTSP
+
Thin clients
=> please read the article
You are awesome. He always has something cool to say. I would recommend anyone to read blogs.redhat.com daily and see whats going on over at redhat. In particular, you can read Havoc's log and other cool stuff here. My favorite is his editorial on "Why free software maintainers are so stuborn".
Regards,
Steve
First, what's so special about this? If you set up a network filing system for your root FS and use LinuxBIOS as your bootable image, you can have a single, central Linux install that is shared with as many computers as you like.
What would be far MORE interesting would be to have a central server with multiple images for different hardware. Then you could boot your nice, shiny IBM mainframe from the same "install" as your desktop PC or the webmaster's Apple Mac.
Another possibility is a massively parallel installer. Basically have one machine on which you are actively installing, but have that machine replicate the write-to-disk operations across the entire network to all the other PCs.
A third option would be to have a distro which set up the entire network as a cluster, but with the config files just on one machine. That way, you don't burden any one machine with having to serve the really heavy-duty stuff, such as applications.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
... to bring a company running thin clients to a grinding halt? Kill the central server... Looks interesting though.... since all config data is stored centrally, it would make sysadmin's lives much easier.
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
There's plenty of Linux clustering technologies available. I wonder how does the Red Hat stuff compare.
Some traits of this thing sound like the ultimate in modular design. Of course, I've done this sort of thing myself already by burning all the necessary files in /home onto a CD-RW. I could blow up my computer right now and probably have an identical Fedora system on another machine in as long as it takes the OS to install. The fact that they're proposing this as coming from a server really isn't that different. Once again, someone has re-invented the thin client. I would like to see something like a "medium client." System-level stuff is remotely hosted so any user-inflicted damage is repaired *once* and for all, but the client retains a disk, and other traits of a fat client, to give the user significant flexibility with what he's doing at the machine. Maybe I'm just talking out my ass, but wouldn't that be a little more useful and/or bandwidth friendly than the thin client everyone keeps talking about? Or would user apps keep breaking?
When Red Hat makes a business out of HOSTING people's systems and apps, then they've out-Microsofted Microsoft.
Back when mainframes were popular (the first time), they were large, expensive, and consumed lots of power... but in the long run less expensive than putting full workstations on every desk and maintaining local copies of settings, software etc. My personal feeling as to why desktops took off is because, at the time of their introduction, it seemed rediculous to have a mainframe in the home. Local copies were fine since most people only had one computer to worry about. This has changed. People now have multiple computers, or at the very least, constantly transfer info between home and work machines. Now, mainframe power is available cheeply and in a small formfactor... and with the use of broadband increasing, it is becomming more and more popular to rid the home and office of multiple full machines, and replace them with terminals that can connect to a shared environment. Personally, I would love to see this take off. It would be nifty if I could "pause" my work at one terminal, and resume it at another in another location. Also reduces overall cost for people who have, let's say, one computer for the parents and one for the kids (the latter more prone to breaking). Cheap thin-clients would be really useful here.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
Really? Their customers (you know, the people that actually pay for the stuff?) seem to like their licensing terms just fine.
The Free desktop that Just Works
I wonder what the IP status of this is.....
C-x C-s C-x k
From the article:
The Free desktop that Just Works
same install image will work on a lot of different hardware i.e a laptop with all the power saving features, IDE hard drives and a P4 M processor that same install image will work on a AMD desktop system with scsi drives...
thats it in a nutshell....
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
You are a nutcase. Completely.
Yes, we all know about NFS shares and LTSP - that's all good and the PDF says that. What's been proposed is a way to do it at a more generic level "out of the box" with a little more polish. It could make everything from class room situations to HA Cluster enviroments easier to deply - using a common set of unix concepts across the board. It's all about raising the standars bar and establishing better working practices.
The astroturf accusation is a serious one. Can you point to whatever source informed you that Red Hat is doing this?
Personally, I use Fedora myself and enjoy it. I would hate to discover that RHAT is employing such an underhanded tactic.
Wikipedia claims differently, as do the California Academy of Sciences and about.com.
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What, the GPL?
If you read the article, you will see that:
1) they don't want users to need root for hardware (but do want users to need the admin to install certain software). This info is in the PDF. They already see that needing root for hardware install or configuration needs to be worked around.
2) the design is a hybrid or amalgamation of thin and fat client, trying to cherry pick the best of both:
applications run on local systems
software and data cached on local disk
central management and configuration of nodes
they call it a cached client technology
3) they have a plan for laptops. Stateless... instantiation, sync... things that sound vague, but they seem to have a plan because this stuff is considered in the howto. There are some notes in the how-to covering the different types of clients:
" diskless clients, which boot directly from a snapshot stored on the server
caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive.
Live CD clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot burned onto a CD
thick clients, which don't use snapshots and must be maintained by another means.
"
The idea has some very cool potential for a business or network situation. I can't imagine this is ready for production, but it could be soon.
-A
First of all, I'm not associated with the project.
However, I've read what they're talking about, and here is where many people are misinterpreting:
This is not a 'thin' client in the traditional sense. The client in this case does the computations.. i.e. it actually runs the app.
In other words, the computer is not merely a display, and as such shouldn't suffer from the traditional mainframe/client shortcomings.. (you have all the CPU power you normally have)
When you think about this, think KNOPPIX and other live-cds, that is the nearest (and quite near, imho) to what they're discussing.
So... why is this different from a normal install?
A normal install has a read-write root, whereas here they're shooting for a read-only root, even if it is still on the local harddrive.
For example, if you asked me a week ago the origin of chopsticks I (like most people) would have responded China, or parts nearby.
And you'd have been correct.
Now this totally neglects the less-than-common knowledge that they were actually created in America in the 1800s by immigrants to mining communities as a means of differentiating their restaurants from more common fare
Crap. Chopsticks have been in use in China and Japan for around 5000 years. This page includes a brief history, and you can get more details here. Note that the second article points out that a museum in Shanghi actually has a pair from the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907). There's also more nice information on Wikipedia.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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before 1000 BC.
Bingo! If the kernel is in some remote location (i.e. Cayman Islands), then enterprises can run all their apps locally, but SCO cannot sue them for copyright violation (because the code is offshore)!
/just kidding
Sure, ping times will be a bitch, but...
davejenkins.com |
The advantages become apparent when you have a large number of identical systems. Even more so when you want them diskless.
That description matches an compute farm in the next room [0]. It also handles the case of 'diskless' install with a local disk, used for application specific working space [1].
Hell, in the next building there is a beowulf of 32 nodes that hasn't bee updated because the updating of 32 nodes wasn't automated, and time crunch [2]. If it's all from a single image, that's trivial to update the lot.
Sure, there are methods of doing all that as it stands. I am unaware of any other distro that has suport for it in mainline.
Oh, lets not forget about the 50 odd machines in the labs. They're all set up for Windows, but something like this would let them boot to Linux, without reformatting disks. I smell an 'over the holidays' compute farm - think over the week of the Christmas break... that's a lot of sums.
There's a few places where I might use something like this. All those have been solved elsewhere, but it would make a number of things much simpler to do.
[0] So to speak. It's actually round the corner, along a bit, and behind a door from my office.
[1] computational chem - 6 GB of precomputed lookuptables, or thereabouts.
[2] No, not mine.
2^5
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My girlfriend has a laptop from work, a large company that enforces a "users don't get admin access to their machines" policy. Fine and dandy, until she brings the laptop over to my house and wants to print something on my printer. Whoops! No device driver for that particular kind of printer in the standard corporate install, and even though I have a CD with the driver sitting right there, we can't install it. So instead she gets to file a request with her company's IT department. It's low priority, so maybe a month from now they'll get around to loading the driver on her machine. (And we'll just keep our fingers crossed that they install the right driver and configure it correctly.)
Drop a image down onto the local drive and boot off of it. So if it is the same, why would this be such a large task at hand? Since OS X is unix based, it seems it isn't that hard of a task.
Please forgive my ignorance on the topic, just going off of what I understand from the reading.
Look, PDF is all well and good for some purposes, but this document is NOT one of them!
Really: this is a nine-page, all-text document, using only one font, and a tad of bold and italic.
A plain text file would have been adequate, and HTML just dandy.
Better yet, it wouldn't have taken 30+ seconds to loadthe freaking PDF Reader just to see that.
Time and time again, I read about various advancements in Linux in this area or that. Most of the time it amounts to catching up to Mac and Windows or something else that has already been done elsewhere. And there's NOTHING wrong with it. If we want to be able to do something, we should be able to do it.
But the one thing [anti-linux] people keep saying is that Linux is all about being a copy-cat and nothing about innovation, new development new technologies or new ideas.
Recently, along with this and some other projects mentioned on Slashdot, I think there is a visible trend where people are actually starting to create "new things" and protoyping new ideas. Recall the idea of the database filesystem? Microsoft has been putting it on the back-burner for a VERY long time and now there is at least one open source project surrounding the idea. Now there's this fairly neat idea of making a Linux client made "pretty thin."
Frankly, I love the idea and am ready to build two more machines to test it out... one as the app server and the other as the client machine. Should be great fun!
That is a magnificent troll!
Truly a beautiful sight to behold. Thank you.
I've been thinking about this way of doing things more and more since the appearance of Knoppix, FAI, Adios, and various cluster installation facilities--and clearly, so has Redhat.
Most importantly, this
1. avoids the absurdity of moving all processing, and indeed disk to a central server
2. focusses attention on development and maintenance of prototype installations for different types of machines
Some of the implementation techniques don't seem pleasant--but they're doing things in a way that appears forward-looking.
I look forward to seeing more of this.
Matt
I agree. Totally.
Before believing our word, consider using Google to search for "chopstick history". You will discover evidence that leads to the predominant view that chopsticks were in fact invented in China about five thousands years ago.
Having briefly discussed the reliability of the author's facts, let us also comment on matters with regard to the style of the text. There is a natural objection to individuals using grammatical form rather than substance in an attempt to manipulate the reader in perceiving his word as judicious.
Such a view seems to have compelled us to verify the essence of the passage and infer a meagre value of content. Upon such information we reckon that it is in fact predominantly canine excrement.
YADIYADAYADIYADA...
Not that its a bad idea, but its not revolutionary, as the story blurb seems to imply..
Actually its the only way to fly in an enterprise environment.. Get the PC back out of the users hands. Should never have given them to the users in teh first place.. 3270's for all!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The ability to boot multiple systems off the same device sounds a lot like VAXcluster technology.
Everything old is new again!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The project is too big, ambitious and lofty. It's just bound to collapse sooner or later IMHO. I don't think anybody /really/ wants to relearn how to deploy Linux anyway.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Interestingly from what I understand the chinese also pioneered the use of forks as eating utensils, and they were brought into other cultures along with the noodle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sounds to me kind of like Plan 9. Im excited and it looks interesting. Cheers!
Wouldn't it be even better if we had a stackless operating system?
Heh. I once made a stateless distro, based on Red Hat, on a hard drive. The intention was to use it as a car ogg player.
/var cannot be mounted read-only (needs /var/run, etc), so I mounted it as a 16M ramdisk, the contents of which was downloaded from /var.tgz at boot time. It worked splendid. Eventually, the slowest part of the boot process was waiting for the BIOS POST to finish.
It had / mounted read-only.
You could power down the thing whenever the hell you liked and never see fsck run.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Democrats hate fetuses and love gays. What about gay fetuses?
Ahhh, but can anyone really be born gay?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You know, dump list of packages, and then load back with --set-selections. No doubt that it will include other things, but about syncing software, I would go that way.
Just put the package files into your home directory.
SheetRock, Where did you take your writing style BTW??? I had to dig trough a bunch of scientific articles to get good examples to write that bullshit.
so here it is for those of you who don't know. From Wiki.
---
In American politics, the term astroturfing is used perjoratively to describe formal public relations projects which deliberately give the impression of spontaneous and populist reactions.
The term is a play on "grassroots" efforts, which are truly spontaneous undertakings. AstroTurf refers to the bright green artificial grass used in some indoor sports stadiums.
A "grassroots" action or campaign is one that is started spontaneously and is largely sustained by private persons, not politicians, corporations or public relations firms. A "grassroots" campaign is perceived to come from the popular feelings of some mass of people and to not be a creation of the powerful.
"Astroturfing", by contrast, is a campaign crafted by politicians or other professionals but carefully designed to appear that it is the result of popular feeling rather than manipulation. The astroturfing campaign attempts to gain legitimacy by appearing to spring forth spontaneously from "the people". If the campaign is well executed, the planners hope that the public at large will believe that "all those independent viewpoints could not have been faked."
Examples of these kinds of practices can be found throughout history, though there is a perception that use of astroturfing is increasing in reaction to the declining credibility of politicians and corporations.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
This is only indirectly related to this article, so I'm aware this is off-topic. I just wanted to say it's heartening to see an amazing number of Linux articles on the front page today. After the rate of 4-5 Microsoft articles a day that Slashdot was running for a while after SP2's release, it's a breath of fresh air to finally start seeing news about the OSS/Linux world again! Please, keep it up.
A file/directory is either
- Static (not changed except by action of the system administrator), or
- Variable (subject to change at any time
and either- Shareable (multiple machines can have a common copy), or
- Unshareable (each machine needs a separate copy).
In an effort that is conceptually equivalent to the separation of the kernel tree into architecture-dependent and -independent subtrees for the Alpha port, which made subsequent architectures far easier, a lot of people have devoted their efforts to determining just how little of what goes into the file hierarchy really has to be unique to the machine.The 'aha moment' comes when you think of groups of workstations with identical hardware, which are candidates for having a common image from which they can be built, and realize that you can build a relational database that correlates MAC addresses (possibly to some other locally-unique but shorter machine number) to the HW configuration. Now, conceptually all of those cookie-cutter-identical machines are a single entity for the purposes of configuration. A lot of what FHS considers 'unsharable' is now quite 'sharable' within such a HW config group.
As workstations age, the IT department brings in a couple samples of the next HW configuration, loads drivers, tests against the app suite, and when they're ready for primetime, the vendor delivers them, the MAC addresses are added to the database, the workstations boot up, find Mommy (bootp server), and Just Work. The user can log out of an old computer and into a new one, and find all his 'stuff' right where he left it. It's the only sane way to compute in an institutional environment.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
So in other words, this really isn't something the average Joe will care about, only sysadmins and people who are working on imaging a lot of systems.
Sounds useful, actually.
Which one of the neat things of Plan9, no user level libs doing filesystems a la gnome-vfs or kioslaves. Damn, even users are "files", and that would be harder to get in Linux (the other is easy, lufs and fuse for example).
This sounds like a great step forward for laptops as well as desktops that are to be "locked down".
I think there should be a more general concept of overlayed filesystems, where a FS could be mounted on top of another FS "with transparency", so that you can see all the files in the entire "stack". A standard "ls" would show 1 instance of each file, with the "highest level" FS taking precedence. A modified program might be able to see all the versions of a particular file and be able to copy one to another (if permissions allow).
If each FS could be mounted RO or RW, then you could have a local copy of everything on a CD or DVD, but make it appear writable by mounting another FS on top (either a local HD, USB pen drive, NFS mountpoint, etc). Recovering back to the original install would be just wiping out the modified files, so the underlying files are now visible.
This would be good for:
- fully functional Linux systems based of a CD or DVD
- FS snapshots for backup or testing
- intrusion detection (diff across file versions)
- version control of the entire OS image
Now, if only I were smart enough to actually write the code.
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Here in grad school my friends from China never even heard of fortune cookies until they came here. It's like reverse culture-shock.
make world, not war
Contrast with LoseXP SuckPackII.
Setting it up, thought, "Oh, I'll just plug in this st00p3d USB WinModem, and configure it with a generic Hayes-compatible modem driver."
OOPS!
It seems that you can't just slap in the same old hardware that's worked in every version since fsck-ing (Windows) 3.0
Add this to the increasingly byzantine dialog boxies, (try setting an environment variable, or viewing them all easily) and you begin to realize that, yes, Christ's observation of the poor applies to Windows, and the Kingdom of Heaven goes to the penguin...
Separate the state from the behavior with respective hardware, sounds interesting. Definitely they will need to break all the encapsulation layers built in todays modern OS and identify the patterns that represent common behavior and common state.
In the article, it makes me wonder, is it better to centralize state or behavior? For instance, centralizing state would be more efficient, but if state was local, you truly own your data (just unplug the network connection). Also, doing the reverse, well, that's pretty much near a basic terminal.
To me, it sounds like java webstart or rio without the fat OS lying underneat it (which is good).
Only if you have had your head stuck in the ground. Freebsd has had this for ages.
50s-era literary stylings mingled with 90s-era corporate press releases.
Dude... As a "geek", I don't go to the Equestrian Breeding forum and ask them to please dumb things down so somebody who doesn't know a filly from a mayor doesn't feel left out.
To even a minor geek, that's a very clear and well stated paper.
This is a very interesting project. As I understand the article, the point - long term - of the development effort is to try to get Linux (RedHat) adopted on the desktop by appealing to the TCO mentality of the IT department rather than by appealing to the desire of the end user to actually get stuff done. In other words, if the savings to IT of administering your machine centrally outweighs the benefits of you (corporate cube dweller) being able to configure your machine to your liking and use it as you see fit, then IT wins, and Linux makes an appearance on the Fortune 2000 desktop.
'Thin client' was the first attempt to dethrone MS in this way, but this approach appears much more sophisticated, and consequently much more likely to succeed. Without seeing how the whole thing plays out I really have no idea whether the approach is successful or not. But it's a really nifty shot across the MS bows.
Whether this goes anywhere or not ends up being decided by (as with most IT projects) whether the services provided by IT to the end users are adequate (in which case IT gets their way) or so obnoxiously limited that the end user cabal ends up storming the IT department with burning torches.
Besides the fact that people have been doing this sort of thing for years, how about we misapropreate some more computer science terms for linux projects? I mean I thought I was going to have to be typeing in cookies into my shell or something.
So how about?
contiguous linux? For the AIM users you know
RTFM linux? Also for the AIM users you know
Or maybe the ultimate:
Goto considered harmful linux? For the masocist in all of us.
God forbid someone can acctually come up with a name.
I started on mainframes. I got really good on mainframes.
I dont think there is anything inherently wrong with one model or the other, as long as it is implemented properly.
but from a sysadmin perspective, a properly set up mainframe is easier to administer, from what i have seen.
give the users PCs for their email and whatnot, but from a data entry/usability viewpoint, my users are far more productive on their terminal emulators.
references: If you get a traffic ticket in minnesota, the data goes into my mainframe system. of course tickets are scanned, then barcoded/OCRd, then automatically entered, requiring non-mainframe systems. but for retrieval and court-entered systems, its all mainframe.
i do recognize that a non-mainframe system might work just as well if implemented correctly. however, you would need several more admins.
Shared state is practically equivalent to stateless? Since when?
so some guy who says he hasnt even read the damned article (which answeres *all* his questions) get modded up to +4?? bizarre.
Very simple, it is stateless so it remembers nothing from command to command. Here's what it would look like to use it:
I for one plan to skip this distro.I'm running a 1.8 p4 and it loads in a few seconds. Yeah, I'm running gentoo, but I think acroread was binary and not compiled from source.
But you don't have to pay DEC an arm and a leg for hardware and software licenses.
The migration of all these ideas into the realm of industry standard, commoditized hardware is a huge deal. The age of one company being able to own a whole market vertically, from the silicon to the user interface, is gone. We left those monopolies behind, and good riddance. But we also left some good ideas behind with those non-free OSes, and now we have to either self-consciously copy them or reinvent them in vastly different environments.
We have a ways to go yet. VMS had networking down cold, in that you could use a cluster of machines of different types, ages, and even architectures (VAX or Alpha) as a single logical machine. UNIX doesn't have anything close to this, nor does any other OS I know of. I hope we can reinvent this in our new systems, and maybe improve it by being OS-agnostic as well.
As an aside, another reinvention I've noticed is the exokernel, originally invented by IBM in the 1960s as VM. VM simply handled hardware partitioning, letting the user run multiple OSes on one hardware system.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
I guess you PLASTERED Sheetrock. DOH!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Is that a combination of Seska and T'Pol, on crack, in a hyperbaric chamber, breathing Romulan Ale, faced with Regulan bloodworms, cuddling with an attentive Klingon Targ?
Maybe Sheetrock should read "1421: The Year China Discovered America". Now THAT is more interesting than chopsticks being invented in America. 1421 blows the doors off a lot of what we were taught in America about WHO "discovered", WHO found a cure for scurvy, WHO mastered timekeeping at sea and ashore, WHO used the North Star to navigate above the equator and WHO sailed hundreds of ships, many of which were over 5 TIMES as long as the Portuguese caravels which paled in comparison (tho they had better manoeuverability/maneuverability than the Chinese junks....)
1421 is so hot MLK library in SJ has all its copies checked out/unavailable... At least I bought my own copy.
Yep, read 1421...
No, I'n not on synthehol, either. (But, at abotu age 3 I did almost die after having swallowed:
Xylene
Aerosol Detergent
and Carbon Tetrachloride
AKA Ampex Stereo (used by funky Reel-to-Reel freaks of the 60's) Headcleaner (yep, the same Ampex off Hwy 101 in Menlo Park, CA)...)
I still have the can as a souvenir... back then the USPS used to allow that shit to be airmailed...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
sounds like they are combining OpenSSI and DRBL.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
We should not call it "stateless Linux". Instead, we should call it "GNU/stateless Linux"!
Exactly the point I wanted to make, and waited for someone to make it... ;-) Not to mention the fact that this is the way I actually deal with day-to-day hassles of not having the most up-to-date, say, gnuplot, available on our company's servers, which does not require a call to sysadm types, but also, as a friend of mine said long time ago "You never learn much of UNIX until you've spent your time on a system on which you had no root..."
Paul B.
A traditional means to achieve at least part of this goal is to mount /usr read-only over NFS and distribute it to various clients. But this is quite risky with Fedora:
i ?i d=119185
/usr is read-only and the sysadmin accidentally tries to install a package, the RPM database is corrupted. Maybe this bug is hard to fix, but it's definitely a bug -- yet one of those fine Fedora engineers closed the bug report with WONTFIX, and insisted that this was indeed correct!
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cg
If you follow the link and you can't believe what's recorded there, it's still correct: if
Most of the work in making this seems to be a matter of tuning all the permissions and behavior of packages. Some of the gaps are filled in already, with live cds and autodetecting hardware and a "cached apps" system(0install) already having been developed. It's just a matter of getting the rest in place, and while it seems a bit unclear at this point, I think they are going in the right direction.
You need to be a linux head to understand why this is useful, but believe me this is very useful. This is not the same as terminal server, but the differences may be hard to understand for a windows user.
We use this system (or a close relation of) at the university of oslo. Your $HOME directory and your $BIN directory never exist on the actual machine that you are working on (actually the $BIN directory uses a system of mounting and mirroring).
One major advantage is that software updates happen automatically without the need to install them. It also means that everybody is on the same version of software. Although we dont really use any proprietory programs, if we did licensing would be much easier to keep track of.
The best thing however is the remote home directory. This means that whichever machine you are sitting on in the network you always have your own emacs, your own X setup, your own scripts and so on.
Remote mounting- the way forward
Hi... We run a project called DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) . The website isF %A5%CE% AA%CC%A4%C0%A7G/DRBL%A8%CF%A5%CE%AA%CC%A4%C0%A7G_2 0040820.pdf
a .php (Traditional Chinese)
http://drbl.nchc.org.tw (Traditional Chinese)
and
http://drbl.sf.net (English).
Maybe someone can have a look at that, some part of DRBL are similar to this Stateless Linux project.
DRBL runs well on RedHat, Fedora, Mandrake and Debian.
In Taiwan, more than 100 sites already downloaded and run DRBL, some of them are schools (Primary/High school/University), some of them are NPO and buisness companies.
check this:
http://drbl.nchc.org.tw/sites/98_DRBL%A8%C
Also, there is a program comes with DRBL called "Clonezilla". It can let people to massively clone the system image to the harddisk of client computers. The function of clonezilla is quite similar to the Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition®. For more information about clonezilla, check this:
http://clonezilla.sf.net (English)
and
http://drbl.nchc.org.tw/clonezill
Although I've never used it, a Domain of OsX machines can mount and boot from remotely networked disk images. Also, a standalone machine (like a laptop) participating to an Apple directory will authenticate against the server providing "terminals" for domain users not present on the machine's local credential database. Domain accounts can be coupled to local accounts available when unplugged from the domain. Save for the first item I've experienced the setup and found it very simple to configure & use. The only kludge is the use of traditional UNIX perms (ugo) that doesn't quite fit the picture. Tiger should take care of that next year. I hope RH etc will make their system "drop in" compatible with the Apple solution (basically it's openldap); the only problem is that consumer i386 HW only has chesy BIOS rather than openfirmware which I think is used to simplyfy the remote booting configuration process.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Is it only me or does the slashdot article describe the project like something Microsoft would suggest ?
It sounds like you could easily shoot yourself in the foot using such a linux. I guess it is cool for LiveCDs and once we get persistent memory into the PC ? And for dongles ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I hear that apt-source allows you to install
things in your home directory, but how automatic is this. Does Debian contain tools that allow for complete automatisation (and a gui)?
fakechroot*: Gives a fake chroot environment
o ot
This package provides a library which overrides libc functions, so it is possible to use root-specific tools without root priviliges.
In fake chroot you can install i.e. Debian boostrap, create developer's environment and build packages inside chroot'ed system using standard non-root user account.
* http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/fakechr
Old hat, on grown-up Unix systems: Netboot and Netinstall, for example.
I've skimmed over the Stateless Linux HOWTO, and it doesn't seem to be all that different from NFSRoot.
Stateless Linux might be a bit broader -- NFSRoot as I have seen it deployed seems to match only the case of, as the HOWTO puts it, "caching clients, which boot from a copy of a snapshot, cached locally on a hard drive", rather than the other three scenarios described under "stateless Linux clients" in the HOWTO -- but that's splitting hairs over what seems to be, in most ways, the same basic idea.
So -- how is Stateless Linux a radically new thing? There are documents for NFSRoot going back to 1997 and maybe earlier, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people were doing things like this on platforms like Sun & SGI well over a decade ago. So -- what exactly is it that's new here ?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
We've been running linux clusters like this for years and have recently released the software for doing it. The software is called oneSIS (http://onesis.sourceforge.net/). This does mostly everything it looks like the fedora stateless project aims at doing:
- Read-only root NFS
- bit-for-bit identical root filesystem
- local disk cache (if desired)
- fine-grained control of independent node/role behavior
- mkinitrd (only better, IMHO)
However, it supports more than Fedora. Currently supported are redhat,fedora,suse,gentoo,and debian.
I've kept it pretty quiet so far, but I guess now might be the time to go public.
Thank you. .
I agree, this has been the UNIX way for a very long time. But truthfully just expecting users to do this causes loads of problems.
Everyone ends up trying to have a full compile of mozilla et al laying about, and it puts a lot of pressures on disk-space and the like.
And it's just too much of that old-school attitude of "if you can't install from sources why are you running UNIX?" attitude that always makes people want to run away from it.
Everyone talks about migrating their granny over to a linux desktop. Do you really want your granny (or your boss, or your CEO, or your administrative assistant) to need to compile their own damned MP3 player from source?
Yes, they can try and compile it themselves. But, really, installing software should be what the admin takes care of.
Cheers.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I am currently running 200 workstations in a thin client environment and we really could not be happier. Not to mention that those 200 are running of a single redhat cluster with nearly 100% uptime for the year. What possible benifit am I going to get over my current environment? Our clients are a mixture of junk we got from a recycler, cdboot from a hacked slax distro or flashboot mini-itx boxes. Total maintenance time per month is measured in mere minutes. And no I am not running LTSP, to complex and I can just buy neoware boxes already configured as a redhat x terminal.
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