Hi all,
I just want to post some "ideas" in this list to see what other fellowers
think about them. We plan to invest some time developing for e-smith and
what to get this right.
First a little feedback. I'm a Industrial Engineer and my speciallity is
quality management. My friend (Juan Jesus) is also an Industrial Engineer
and his speciality is electrical systems.Our first contact with e-smith was
a year ago while searching for a solution for a small office we worked at.
They had 4 Windows client and wanted shared acces to the internet, files,
etc, etc. At that moment we didn't know about e-smith so we made a custom
SUSE install for them. It has worked wonderfully for them in this time but
has a big problem, you need to know linux to administer it (webmin is too
difficult for some people :(
So we found e-smith. I believe it's a great product, probably the best
distro arround for such a task, but in this time we have found some minor
"weaknesses". Probably we have found them because we have seen many other
distros, and sure the owner doesn't know they even exist but, well we like
what we made with that SUSE and whant to try to get more or less the same
with e-smith.
First, some times e-smith might be too simple to install. Yes, I agree its
perfect when you don't know anything about computers and linux but, what
happens when you know what you are doing? This simplicity makes your work a
little harder. One thing thats easy to solve its e-smith way of just using 1
hd and partition it in a hard way. In our custom system we have one
partition just for data and a second (smaller) hd just for backup. A script
runs everynight and makes a complete compressed backup of the data. Yes
sure, you can do this with e-smith downloading to a separate computer or
using a tape unit, but you know most of the times this kind of busnisses
don't have a single procedure for this (for example in our case, the owner
has just made 2 backups in a year from the secondary hd to cdrom when he was
supposed to do it monthly). Messing with tapes or just remembering to do a
backup sometimes is too much for a unknownfull person. The backup change is
quite easy to implement in e-smith (just change fstab and make a cron entry)
but not so the data partition (without using a secod hd I mean).
Then comes the filesystem. I have read the faq and know what you think
about other filsystems than ext2. I might agree with you they might be not
stable enough (even when SUSE uses Reiser for a long time without problems
(they were caused by VIA chipset instead)) but as a SUSE user for a long
time (my destop computer has SUSE 7.0) I just love it and have not had a
single problem with it. We would like to try to add some kind of complete
journalling filesystem support for e-smith (not as a separate hd as i have
said). The main reason, well a guy that is scared of a tape unit is also
scared of a UPS system :)))) Seriously, not everybody has a UPS unit and I
don't like the idea of a system that is uncapable of starting up (a broken
system that starts up and connects to the internet might be remotely solved,
but if it cant start there is no remote chance). Why not givin the rebuild
orders manually? Try to say to a Windows 98 "expert" he should type
something like fdisk -tescsde /dev/hda6 bla bla bla (just kidding) just to
start the computer. He might accept a 2 hour delay to start but sure as hell
I don't what to get a call saying "My system wont boot up" and have to
travel 500 km to get it solved. I'm talking about robustness. Maybe a
solution could be a separate partition just to make an emergency startup
but, who knows.
We thought about using Reiser because is the one used longer in Linux and
has support for a 2.2.18 kernel (the one used in e-smith). I thought ext3
was too risky yet as is JFS (a suspicius jump form 0.2 to 1.0). Maybe XFS
but I hought it only worked on the 2.4 series kernel. If anybody in this
list has started a similar project, please tell us so we can work together.
If somebody whats to work with us, raise your hand :)
Next comes our monitor package. We are trying to achieve an e-smith addon
(or should I call it blade now :) that lets you "see" the state of the
system. As a quality management specialist I know of the importance of
seeing a tendence to discover when something is wrong. As someone posted in
a previous topic, an alert system would be a great add on for the monitor
system, but this will have to wait jus a bit. Our idea is: let the system
call you when something goes wrong and then use the visual display and
Charlie's log viewer to solve it (thanks Charlie). Why not using Mitel's
service link? Well, with those prices I find it really hard to sell a single
unit to somebody that just says a UPS unit is expensive and not needed. Here
in Spain you will find it really hard to sell it (we are the second country
in the world in software piracy :(((( not to mention the lack of spanish
support (at least an internalization support so we could just translate it
in a elegant way, not just editing the functions). BTW, does e-smith have a
lm_sensors aware kernel?
So our future directions would be: finish e-smith monitor (make it stable
and bug free), add an alert system and try to add a journalling filesystem
support. If somebody has anyexperience or wants to help, say it.
Regards.
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