[Server-devel] XS + CFEngine? / Web CP?

[Mike Dawson]

Hi All,

Greetz from Kabul.  We have a very exciting upcoming deployment to
Kandahar coming up and hopefully many more deployments :)

There are two main things that caught my eye for trying to integrate
into XS (and I'm willing to put in development time / expertise as
well :) ):

1. Adopting cfengine as part of the package so that one can easily set
a master policy and have all the school servers across the country
follow.  I use this in our office at the moment and have been thinking
about using this to make the deployment easier to manage.  This way we
can actively push out updates to the clients and it gives us a toolkit
to say what to update, when etc. (e.g. can manage the OS image
updates, activity updates, etc)

2. Trying to a little bit deskill / make easier the installation of
school servers.  We have made a pure wireless deployment system using
Freifunk / mesh networking between routers to form a wireless
backbone.  That way just bang the box on the all and all should be
well.  I'm wondering what it would take to make a web control panel
kind of interface to the school server.  This would make it easier to
checkin on the school server remotely (e.g. GPRS / VPN link stuff),
and generally increase the pool of people who would then be
'administrators'.

I have made some cron job based tools for doing that before.  This
would be non resident and run only when changes have been made to the
config that require it to be run.  SME Server had a nice model for
this.

3. If possible / our development time allows I would love to put in
Nagios so that we can get some accurate reporting of uptime of routers
in the classroom etc.

If we had that then I could make some standard OS images for the type
of hardware that we have plus a setup wizard that would make it a
point click, boot matter to install a school server.  For those
without connectivity I think we could make a key based system so that
if the 'roaming update netbook' comes onto the school server network
on a reserved address that it could respect this as it's cfengine
master and then follow the orders.

What are the requirements for this to become part of the main XS
build?  That really is the sustainability that we need...

Thanks/Regards,

-Mike