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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."
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.
Posts like:
NFS read-only & shared root is enough
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LTSP
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Thin clients
=> please read the article
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
Well, most of us don't /really/ want to relearn *anything*. Sometimes, however, when you hear a new idea relating to an area you work in, the penny drops, and you are left thinking "wow, what a great idea".
For instance, I work in a scientific research environment (high energy physics) where most of our software is Free (capital F), we work in different places at different times (planning, lab, analysis), we have a great deal of customized and hand written software and the ideal development environment so far has been NFS mounted home directories (running RedHat and now Fedora). In theory every machine I log into is running the same OS, with /usr/local NFS mounted from an [application|file] server, I login though NDIS and my home directory is also NFS mounted.
This works fine in theory - except without a serious admin budget, different OS versions spring up... I have access to machines running RH9, FC1, FC2... and that's an improvement, whilst RedHat were still supporting RHL, we had 7.3, 8.0 and 9.0, with wildly different GCC versions. What happens? I end up using specific machines with a similar enough environment that all my simulations will at least compile without tweaking, and all my scripts etc work the same way. Homogenous environments, no matter how ideal, are not a possibility without a manpower commitment that many SMBs and other small operations can't afford.
This stateless project LEAPS out at me as an ideal way for small operations (like up to 100 seats) to be managed by a single (even part time) admin.
Not to mention the attempt to tackle laptops - which is the reality of the workplace. Many people have laptops. A lot of them (and their CTOs) would love to be running the same environment as the workplace LAN. At my lab most people have a laptop due to the amount of travelling we do - I'd guess that 90% of them are running XP, since even if they did run linux, they'd have to administer it themselves, wouldn't have clearance to access the NFS shares for $HOME and /usr/local.
Although the laptop aspect still has a troubling achilles heel: most of us (well, my colleagues at least) have laptops in order to present our work to others. Even ignoring the ubiquitousness of PowerPoint, who amongst us would want to be on the road with a "cached client" laptop with NO write-access to anything but $HOME. Sure, the system worked at the office, and you fixed all the bugs that cropped up when you connected from home on you DSL, but what about a strange environment. You need to connect over someone elses WiFi to get the latest figures (sure, TFA talked about user-configured WiFi, but still, what if they have different security like WEAP that needs a new package and root access), or if you NEED to plug in a USB key to give a collaborator or customer your files. What then?
Regardless, this to me is a prospective Killer App for linux, and is definitely tackling a bunch of issues that may niggle an admin for several years before they could even define what the problem is. Automatic updates across _all_ your workstations. Backups that require 10 minutes work after a crash - and I can attest that a recent HD crash to our "distributed" system took a few hours to get the machine back together, but several days before all the little minor tweaks we needed had been applied (things like monitor resolution, 'sudo' configuration, extra packages, sound drivers.
For the first time, I stand up and say, THANK YOU REDHAT and THANKS FEDORA. This project tells me that you are thinking about your installed customer base and offering _really_ innovative ideas to the community. Anyone want to moan about how Linux is always playing catchup to MS and Apple and how F/OSS is doomed to lag behind forever?