[Server-devel] Hi + Building the School Server

[Daniel Wyatt Margo]

First, to those whom I haven't met at the office, hello! I'm Daniel Margo,
a friend of Kim and Lincoln Quirk, and I've been in Cambridge this week in
order to educate myself about the school server project and produce some
useful content.

Scott and I have been doing research and talking to j5 and sj, and we are
building out the wiki at
http://www.laptop.org/teamwiki/index.php/Tech:Building_the_School_Server .
At the moment, it contains some brief summaries of the systems already in
place, and our discussions this week. I'll continue to flesh it out as we
talk, and I'd love to move some of the discussion to this list.

In particular, I've been looking at configuration management and Holger's
FAI setup. One of the issues I have been thinking about is, what is the
best way to maintain and push out configuration updates without clobbering
or discouraging local customizations? Right now, configuration is
performed directly by FAI's scripts, which Scott and I think could be hard
to maintain and raises other questions, such as the idempotence of the
configuration scripts. I looked into .rpm configuration packages, but
after talking with j5 he discouraged this, and suggested that instead, we
might pull important configuration files directly from a version control
system, even post-deployment. Rather than having FAI run configuration
scripts, FAI's scripts could simply fetch configuration files from version
control. It's simple, and it might even give us some neat features, like
the ability to merge, or revert if we accidentally do clobber local
settings.

What do people think of this as a model for post-deployment configuration
management?