Hi all codevelopers,
We are going to start a new project (besides e-smith monitor) to add some
robustness to a working e-smith server.
Some of the work will be hardware dependant so it won't be usable for all
of us, but we believe it could be a good contribution to e-smith. Anybody
interested in this project, please put in contact with us. As allways, all
the code and packages will be GPL.
SCENARIO
As I have posted in previous emails our formation is in the field of
industrial engineering. We like robust systems and believe e-smith is
currently not robust enough. Most of this project has been inspired by our
by now famous "boss server example" and an old Linux Journal article. We are
going to try to reproduce that system with e-smith.
IDEA
Use a second hard disk to add some robustness to an e-smith server. This
project wont add redundancy for data (RAID) but increase the system's
robustness. As currently is quite hard to modify the installation process of
e-smith, we have decided to add all the necessary software in a second hard
disk.
In the second hard drive you will have:
1) A bootable linux system, as small as possible to make a small rpm
package (maybe an embedded distribution).
2) An image of the first hard drive system so it can reformat the first
hard drive.
3) A directory where tar.gz or zip files are stored for a daily backup
of /home/e-smith structure
If the system is not capable of starting up by itself (file system check
fatal error) or by choosing an especific linux image on bootup (something
like "panic") the system will bootup from the second hd, reformat first hd,
install a working ESGS image (created from the main hd every week or so) and
recover most of the data in the system. After that it will reboot back on
ESGS.
Why 1? To make the system bootable even in case the first hd wont boot up.
We don't consider Compact Flash as this is VERY hardware specific (a second
HD is quite common)
Why 2? To get your system back. Sure, this procedure is quite "hard" but
secure. Any other idea?
Why 3? Because you want your data back. Why tar.gz or zip files? Because
in the meantime you can use this directory for normal backup. Tar and zip
files are quite common and making some of them (one per ibay and/or user)
will make the sizes workable. This way, a dummy admin could recover an
specific file with the programs he is used to (mainly winzip). Tape backups
are too complicated for some people and the current desktop procedure makes
a huge file and not viewable. This way you should be able to recover an
specific file.
Other possibilities:
* Add some kind of journalling file system support into ESGS. We are
thinking in ReiserFS or JFS as XFS only works with 2.4 kernels. This is a
more complicated project as we will need to modify current ESGS install
procedures and this won't work with most installed systems.
* Any idea? Please, bear in mind what we are searching, we are not
talking about data backup (but we will use it as it's neccesary) or data
redundancy (RAID). We are talking about a system that wont boot up. For
example, give an alert to some email address if this procedure is needed,
etc.
* UPS is allready achieved in ESGS so we don't add it in this project
(to focus our efforts and don't over step other's).
Well, we hope you like the idea and some of you unite us :)
See you.
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