[Server-devel] Building the School Server

[Daniel Wyatt Margo]

j5 suggested mount --bind as a solution to this problem, which is in some
ways similar to UnionFS. We could bind mount our configuration files (or
symlinks) over the /etc defaults; this gives us the desired effect,
without having to clobber the defaults or futz around with the .rpms that
own them.

A different tool, suggested by Chris Blizzard, is Puppet, which is a
configuration manager that is a little more high-level, and geared towards
managing configuration files, than FAI. Puppet is powerful, but has some
deficiencies (most notably, no logging) which make me wary. It's more of
an IT tool than a development tool.

As for .rpm configuration packages -- j5's revised and clarified opinion
is that, although he encountered various problems trying to develop an
.rpm-based solution on the XO, he thinks that those issues may have been
XO-specific (I think it's less-than-ideal given the mesh topology and the
space constraints of the XO), and that, given that we address the problem
under discussion, wad's solution would work. But, on the other hand, there
is existing work that has been done on the XO towards a binary diff soft
update solution that might be worth making use of, at least at this stage
of development.

- Daniel Margo

> Couldn't we do something clever with UnionFS to solve this problem?
>
> --Jared
>
> On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 13:17 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> > > OLPC specific configuration files should be separate from those
>> > > provided with
>> > > the package whenever possible (FC7 largely supports this).
>>
>> OK, I asked a couple of red hat people I saw around here, and no one
>> seemed to know anything about this.  Can you elaborate on the meaning
>> of this sentence a bit more?
>> To use a specific example, if I want dhcpd to use
>> /olpcconfig/dhcpd-config instead of /etc/dhcp3/dhcp-client.conf,
>> you're claiming that FC7 has some mechanism for doing this that
>> doesn't involve overwriting any RPM-controlled files?
>>  --scott
>
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