!startmeeting fedora-server

Meeting started at 2024-08-14 17:00:30 UTC

The Meeting name is 'fedora-server'

Let's wait a moment. I'll post the agenda in 2-3 minutes with a new business to deal with in addition to the agenda as sent earlier today.

!hi

John Himpel (jwhimpel)

!hello

Emmanuel Seyman (eseyman) - he / him / his

!hellow

!hello

Steve Daley (mowest)

Welcome everybody, (nearly) full house today!

Indeed. Glad to see everybody here

jednorozec: Are you online?

!hi

Tomáš Hrčka (humaton) - he / him / his

😀

kind of here, my body is back home but my brain feels like its in US/EST

Yeah, the famous jet lag

Let' start.

Any comment / propoal?

analog or digital?

We have basically the same state as 14 days ago

Still open, we have a new fix provided by David Teigland, LVM maintainer, for the VM image. I'll test it as soon as I can.

See:

This is the current list. So we have a lot to do for the next weeks / months

I was able to find out what needs to be done to use the survey software they used for the AI survey. So I'm at the point of needing to have the questions to put into the survey software.

mowest: I'll do my best to deliver!

Justin W. Flory (he/him): can give me access to the survey software when we are ready to create the final survey with the questions that we determine.

I can help with https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2247872

let me port the patch proposed there to correct place

jednorozec: That would be great!!!!!!!! My list is so long

Thanks a lot!

OK, let's proceed

Lots of things here...

Unfortunately, I am a listener here.

I was there (getting from NYC to Rochester took some doing)

I got to talk to almost everybody I had a subject of discussion with

I am writing a recap but going back to France, recovering from jetlag and seeing my family has taken priority

I don't know if anyone has comments on my summary linked above.

I watched the video feed. I think MOWEST's summary covered the highlights.

mowest: I have, specifically about the "atomic" discussion (and I agree with your argument).

From the feed, I could not see how many were in the audience?

John Himpel: 5 or 6 people

Yes, I do believe that "bootc" is just too early to be of use for Fedora Server releases.

https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/pull-request/1046

if it we will need one for branched as well

We got a shout out from VP Mike McGrath that more people should have attended our Server Birds of a Feather.

His talk was right after ours, and he came for a little while to our session.

In other talks at Flock, it seems as though many groups are awaiting a major revision of the current build processes. Did MOWEST or EMMANUEL pickup on that vibe also?

To be fair, we threw together the talk, submitting it just hours before it happened

The new Git Forge was much of the talk at Flock

John Himpel: I did get that feeling several times during the event

Yes there are big changes ahead of us.

Hopefully, that will solve some of our issues with different install media generating different results when installation is complete

Other conversations outside of our BOF. I heard from the CentOS crew that they would like to see Fedora Server be "First" in pushing server. Since Fedora Server is probably not used much in the enterprise (of course, I think how Peter Boy uses Fedora Server could be considered "enterprise" at the University).

I am not sure about that, kiwi needs some better anaconda understanding. And that would open us to switch the image to kiwi and simplify the whole rpocess

Wondering, what means "First in pushing server"

First to try new things in the server space.

OK. I think, we are doing that, in a nan-atomic way :-)

Controversial, like "first to make btrfs default file system."

We have good readons not to do that!

readons -> reasons

At lease not the way as workstation does it.

First to be a solid platform for Home Assistant, the home automation server.

readons -> reasons

I agree to that !!

Home assistant is not really doable on our platform

or am I mistaken?

First to provide a solid WebUI, which I think we already do with Cockpit on first boot up and running.

only container, they have no support for SElinux

jednorozec: what a pitty! I didn't know that

But we can use systemd container

I think we could think of other things that we could be first in that would put us ahead of the curve of other server platforms.

I believe our efforts with Ansible and having ready made Playbooks for Server Use cases would be a good one for example.

@Mowest agreed. We should dedicate a planning discussion to that topic.

Also, we could be the first to package up and deploy Inca Container Technology. I don't know another distro that is highlighting support for it.

Having 1st class support for https://github.com/ansible/awx might also help

mowest: Do you have a link about Inca?

jednorozec: Good idea!

++1

Regarding atomic: The biggest advantage of an atomic system is the ability to revert completely to the previous status at any time after an update. We should be able to solve this using an LVM snapshot backup and recover system. This is particularly important for systems in a data center without direct access to a local terminal. That seems more worthwhile to me than an atomic version. We would have to use the possibility of anaconda to automatically start a VNC, for example.

Peter Boy: Sorry spelling mistake here is the link = https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/introduction/

Yeah, I know the LXD version. Thanks

Peter Boy: Yes, I love the idea of having LVM snapshots working. I don't think Fedora Workstation has Btrfs Snapshots yet, which is one of the main benefits of Btrfs so if we could do it with LVM in Fedora Server and have an easy way to implement it that would be great.

Instead of Inca, we could also promote systemöd containers: High integrated maintainability via Systemd, update capable, etc. Many advantages over LXC,

TLDR : Fedora people are a great bunch to hang around with, going to the US was worth it just to meet mowest and we need to make a decision wrt regards to Ansible playbooks or doing things by hand

I will finish my recap this week and send it to the mailing list.

Yes, I agree that meeting Emmanuel Seyman was one of my favorite highlights of the trip as well. There is nothing better than meeting in person, and discovering that we have common interests outside of Fedora too.

Emmanuel Seyman: that was my experience during Flock 2023, too. Very worthwhile!

And I promise: 4 weeks before the next Flock I will stop riding my bike to be on the safe side. :-)

I also heard that in the Fedora family, Fedora Server, is the slowest to move and is probably the most backwards compatible with older hardware. So there is a tension between being "first" in areas, and at the same time being nice on older hardware and play nice with older technology.

Peter Boy: See https://fedoramagazine.org/working-with-btrfs-snapshots/ regarding btrfs snapshots (Backup & Restore)

mowest: YEs, and we are vcery stable and highly backwards compatible in using it!

@Jah

John Himpel: Thanks!. By he way, LVM snapshots and BTRFS snapshot are differfent in technic, but very alike in terms of how to make use of it.

BTRFS has “ pinched” the idea from LVM

Besides my summary, the other conversations encouraged that concept of Fedora Server striving to be "first" among the server platforms, and Fedora Server remaining compatible with older hardware and technologies.

mowest: ++1

I'm hopeful that if we put together a good survey that it will help us consider next steps and efforts that would continue to expand the use of Fedora Server.

Agreed!

I guess, we have exchanged all the important topics for the time beeing?

Yes, I'm done.

I put our discussion together in a tracking issue for our future plannings.

OK, let's switch!

John Himpel: I still own you a review of your playbooks. Sadly, Flock left me too exhausted in the evenings to do it last week

Hopefully, I can do this by the next meeting

Emmanuel Seyman: I completely understand.

Our time is nearly up. So we should agree upon how to proceed, what to do next.

I guess, I should synchronize stagging and main, so we can use stagging for development as intended.

Emmanuel Seyman: 1++

I am certainly not a git expert. But the ansible directories are in "main", but missing in "stg". This is among many other differences. Should I add the ansible directories to "stg" or will that mess up syncing our ansible stuff later on?

Or should we expand our documentation about how to use our repo?

Peter Boy: 👍️

The ansible directories should be added in stg. Don't worry about syncing

John Himpel: I'll synchronize the 2 branches, if we agree to systematically use stg for development (I'm very much in favour to di this. It was my fault to put it in main).

Emmanuel Seyman: Thanks! Unfortunately my mind is still stuck in CVS thinking mode.

b) add the Ansible dirs to stg

Well, so we agree so far on

a) expand our documentation

I can do both tomorrow

👍️Peter Boy 👍️

Peter Boy: ++1

mowest gave a cookie to pboy. They now have 31 cookies, 3 of which were obtained in the Fedora 40 release cycle

ANother question may be: which role library want we use: the "book" Emmanuell is "rpm-ing" or the classical Fedora, or both?

Oh sorry for the 2 "l"s

Until the robertdebock roles rpm is in Fedora, I wouldn't count on it

OK, so we start with using the Fedora version and will see, how far we get or if it is advantagious to use robertdebock later.

Emmanuel Seyman: I have looked at the ansible roles from robertdebock are of a good quality and we should package and use them when possible

I need to make sure my package follows the Ansible guidelines and I'm hoping Robert will update the collection soon. Once those two actions are done, I'll submit the rpm

My initial scan of the classical fedora roles, is they install the software, but don't do much in the way of configuration.

Question: Do we really need to RPM this stuff or does Fedora/RedHat have an ansible galaxy repository that we could use?

There's only one Ansible Galaxy and I really would prefer telling people to use rpms instead of pulling stuff from there

Emmanuel Seyman: ++1 for rpm!

Understood

pboy has already given cookies to eseyman during the F40 timeframe

Zodbot is showing off today.

I won't last much longer. Dinner is almost ready

Oh, yes. out tine is up.!

Peter Boy: Heal quickly!

It would be nice if everything that we have documented for Fedora Server like these new Ansible Playbooks to set up server are available from the default repos after a default install.

I do my best, and I'm doing quite fine already

Peter Boy: Good to hear.

Yes, that's great

Well, let's continue next week how we want to distribute our Ansible Playbooks .

So, see you next week !!

bye, folks. See you next week!