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Because the development of fedora stateless is quite frozen, we decided to drop it just an hour ago. We discussed a new strategy and have chosen for Ubuntu Kickstart. Kickstart, the automatic (recorded) installer for Fedora or SuSE is now ported to Ubuntu too since version 5.04 Hoary. We'll set up a PXE-boot enabled server wich will let the clients choose between windows or Linux, or just install Linux when we want it. Normally we should recieve new hardware next week, so the project will be kickstarted too ;-)

Now the exams have finished it's time when start working
on the fedora stateless server. First thing we need
too do is find a bigger hard disk because the current
one isn't big enought to build an image.
And then the big moment: testing :-)

(sorry, post was in protected tree instead of published for a long time)

Peter: The stateless-snapshooter snapshot creation went fine normally. We left the machine alone while it was creating the snapshot, but it was at 5% when we left, so I guess everything was going fine.

It looks like the stateless RPM's have some missing dependency on some obscure Python package that's installed when you yum install gnome, but not when you install some basic headless server.

Let's hope everything works out fine now :-)

I just recieved this message through the fedora-devel-list. The goal is to boot Fedora Core 3 by PXE and mount root from NFS (readonly). Maybe an interessting alternative for in case we can't get the real stateless working. It isn't that good, I think, no caching for example, but maybe it could be nice to temporaly provide such an installation to provide an easy management and configuration of all clients. Also interesting for some testing purposes before installing the real stateless, if we have to wait till some improvements and continuation of that project. An option to think about!

Yeah! Finally this blog is up again! Don't blame me, Jens or ikke, it wasn't our fault :-p

With that downtime, I hadn't the possibility to post a quite important message that could change our plans drastically and even could stop our project. As you can see in this message on the fedora-devel-list, the Fedora Stateless project isn't in active development right now. At RedHat, they're thinking about the future of the whole project. They don't know yet if they'll continue the project. I think the goals of this project are fantastic so I hope they continue it! It could be a very nice system and a great help for sysadmins of public computers, like in universities or libraries, even in companies. There could even be a nice future for it in the thin clients Hitachi is introducing. On this article (or this one for dutchspeaking people) you can see Hitachi wants to protect the information that's now stored on the notebooks of their employees by creating a thin client with no harddisk so all information must be stored on a server. In that way, a client running fedora stateless could be a more nice solution because all program's run on the computer of the employee and information is stored on the server by network mount. A big advantage is that you can use standard computers for this purpose.

So, let's hope they continue the whole project. And if they continue it, RedHat will place a number of people working on it.

If they don't continue, then I don't know what to do with our project. Just give up and stop the whole project? Restart from the beginning with an X-environment and hope we can create a working system? Others already did it, as I've seen on the fedora-devel-list. I don't know. Let's hope future will bring some good news.