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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."
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.
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
Posts like:
NFS read-only & shared root is enough
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LTSP
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Thin clients
=> please read the article
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
Welcome to the world of 'dumb terminals' again. Thanks for playing this long!
Free XBox, PS2
It is intended to be a balance between thin and fat clients. So you have applications stored on the server, but copied and executed locally.
Seems like a good idea to me.
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
If you'd bother to read the white paper or howto (sure, I'm new here) you'd have read that this is more than NFS mounted roots.
It's a framework for managing the servers, cached operation, integrated authentication etc. You can use this framework to manage roaming devices like laptops, allowing automatic install images, etc. etc.
An NFS solution requires network connectivity the whole time, this doesn't.
Cheers Koz
Terminals did not have their own CPU to do things. Here everything is kept local, except the OS install which can easily be managed. Since Linux can work without rebooting for driver installs (which is a necesity in this case) you can even run different kind of hardware on a single install. Basically you now have a flexible, cheap network computer.
And since we cannot do without networking anyway, and since storage devices are easy to make high available, this would seem like a blessing to me.
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.
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
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
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.
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?