SIGs/Server

Fedora Server SIG

Welcome on the home of Fedora Server SIG. We are a group which would like to use Fedora as a server on bare metal or in virtual environment that may or may not provide graphical capabilities. Our focus is mainly on Fedora server components, and features like networking, head-less support, or iSCSI. You can object that there are no Fedora server users, but they are there - either running Fedora itself or distributions based on Fedora such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS.

Rationale

There is a lot of work being done for one group of Fedora users, but it looks like that the second one is being omitted. The first one is covered by the Desktop team and the second one, let's call it Server, Classic, OldSchool, etc, has no formal representation in the Fedora community.

You can object that there are no Fedora Server users, but they are there - either running Fedora itself or derivates of Fedora called RHEL, CentOS etc. But we think that the main problem is the lack of communication between these groups and we want to help here.

In an ideal world they will complement each other, but in the real life there will be conflicts, so we must try to find a technical solution - by maintaining compatibility, with possibility to enable/disable features, etc.

We would like to help to improve emerging rather desktop-oriented applications to better cooperate with the current server-oriented parts of the system.

Participants

• Dan Horák (sharkcz)
• Tomáš Mráz (tmraz)
• Karel Zak (kzak)
• Adam Tkac (atkac)
• Daniel Mach (dmach)
• Milan Broz (mbroz)

...

Our goals

• improve communication between people around low-level system components and people around desktop,
• maintaining the classic network configuration layer (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts) as a longterm compatibility solution (move into a standalone package)
• create a spin targeted at head-less servers, NAS and similar devices (running on both physical and virtual hardware),
• reduce the dependency on desktop packages to lower the attack surface of the server (work on more fine-graded dependencies),
• work on CLI equivalents of misc GUI tools (eg. write new frontends for existing backends),
• help to better integrate new features into existing infrastructure
• serve as a community liason for Red Hat partners
• create lightweight installer similar to creating buildroots by mock
• ...

Random questions

• why do we need plymouth to install new kernel?
• should be desktop paradigm of a user session used on servers?
• should exist a lightweight network configuration mechanism for servers or eth0-only workstations?