Meeting started at 2026-04-29 17:00:41 UTC

The Meeting name is 'fedora-server '

!hello

Emmanuel Seyman: Emmanuel Seyman (eseyman) - he / him / his

!hi

Hi, Peter Boy (ServerWG, Docs)

MatH: Mat H (theprogram)

OK, I start the meeting because I don't know if John is online.

Folks you were to quick. 😏

!hi

MatH: Mat H (theprogram)

!group members server-wg

Members of server-wg: Alexander Bokovoy, Adam Williamson, Paul Maconi, eseyman, jwhimpel, Kevin Fenzi, korora (@korora:fedora.im, @korora1981:matrix.org), mowest, ngompa (@conan_kudo:matrix.org, @ngompa:fedora.im, @pharaoh_atem:opensuse.org, @ngompa:kde.org, @ngompa:almalinux.im), Peter Boy, Stephen Gallagher

Welcome to our weekly Server WG meeting.

I'll post the agenda in 2-3 minutes.

As usual, let's wait a moment for everybody to show up.

!hi

Emmanuel Seyman: Emmanuel Seyman (eseyman) - he / him / his

!hi

John Himpel: John Himpel (jwhimpel)

Hi John! I didn't know if you will be online. So I started shortly before the end of the first min. Can you take over the ansible part?

We had agreed to continue the discussion, particularly regarding the Ansible project.

We already discussed the agenda, so i think let's start.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/server-working-group/wg-minutes-2026/

Regarding the action, see the list in our

meetings overview:

Fedora has been release yesterday.

Pere-Andreu about the home server spin-off. He might also be interested in contributing

to the Beginners’ Guide.

several expressions of interest in the accompanying chat. And I had a lengthy chat with

We had a talk at the release party. We had no time to discuss about it but there were

So we had some nice feedback to the spin-off

Has someone something to announce? Or comment?

Release party had a lot of interest, and we had new people approach after it, so lets do it again

A while back, you asked for screenshots of the installation process

I took a few : https://eseyman.fedorapeople.org/server_44/

!hi

Jocelyn Gould (UTC-4): Jocelyn Gould (korora) - she / her / hers

Yes, I got the message (or email). I'll update our docs either today after the meeting or tomorrow. The time between the rc and the release was quite short this time.

OK, let's move on.

Tracking issue: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/server/tickets/issues/186

max 10 mins

How do you think did we manage the testing this time?

Can we be content with our efforts? What should we do better or otherwise

Can we be content with our efforts? What should we do better or otherwise?

I meet a bunch of people that want to test 'Fedora', we could probably recruit some of them, but they need a list of thing to test, rather explicit

I'm happy with what we did this cycle

I managed to get some good data reported back on the 1.7 test matrix leading into the go/no-go.

MatH: We have a tracking ticket for each release cycle. This contains the testing tasks

See link above to f44

Cheers, I will lead people to it

What remains to be done?

1. Faulty partition table entries

It's non release breaking, but needs to get fixed.

I think the 16 mb gap is intentional

I can't remember if it's where the uboot stuff gets stored or if that's an alignment thing, but I know it was discussed one or two releases ago at length outside of Server.

That is the question. There were issue in release 42, ir I remember. But there was no intentional gap as it is now.

Neal Gompa (Fedora): Can we action you on this KIWI issue?

As I got the current discussion, it is partly dependent of the tool you use, Kiwi our alternative (I don't get the name out of my head).

https://pagure.io/fedora-kiwi-descriptions/pull-request/219

"This ensures that there's empty space for arm-image-installer to

inject firmware blobs into images as part of preparing to install

for various single board computers."

Yes, I remember that. But as I remember, we wanted to make the start of the partition table move. And some other tool does this different.

Nevertheless, we that's the only way we can reserver the required space, we should create a reserved partition. Not let a space.

MBR must be located on LBA 0

MBR contains the partition table (as well as a small space in the first 440 bytes for "bootloader jump code")

cmurf: Yes, so may be a reserved empty partition? Just empty but required seems a bitt odd

There is just another thing:

2. File naming and Web site wording

We finally need to rename some of the files. the DVD part is disgusting and makes us a laughing stock

legacy BIOS CPUs only ever read LBA 0 by default. I don't understand the full details at a low level but that's how BIOS works, as I understand it, it reads LBA 0

OK, our 10 mins are off. So we should discuss this next time morfe extensivly.

It is possible for those 440 bytes of code in LBA 0 to not do anything with the partition table in LBA 0, and instead jump to some other location and read a partition table. There is code for this in syslinux for jumping to and reading a GPT for example

That sounds good!

but I can't tell you what myriad firmware (especially ARM) expect in regards to LBA 0

I'm referring to legacy BIOS on x86 for what it's worth

But let's switch to the next topic, otherwise we run out of time. Lets's pick up the latter two issues next meeting.

No tracking issue

max 20 mins

John Himpel: will you take over?

At our last meeting we had a spirited discussion, but little concensus.

Indeed.

Peter Boy (ServerWG, Docs) wrote the text at that link, I made a number of adjustments based on last week's discussion

I think it was agreed, we need a "Fedora Server - Ansible usage" document with liberal references to existing Ansible provided docs.

Yes, this sounds like a good idea

I think we agreed to provide a couple of examples to run from commandline and from roles.

One question is: Can we agree about the explicit goals as described in the doc with Emmanuels mods?

So we don't start the discussion about goals and options again and again.

I've been on pain pills all week that make concentration difficult, so I haven't looked at that doc.

Oh, get well soon!

The goals seem very focussed, and very reasonable

Unfortunately, surgery is at least six weeks in the future.

Regarding the example, Emmanuel proposed mysql, my idea was if wew can pick postgres instead.

They are limited in scope, yet extensible when the roles themselves are stated

postgres is our officially supported db

We should go with our official supported db

Going back to the examples that John was talking about, does anyone have an idea of what we could suggest?

Applying updates to a system is the first thing that comes to mind

Yeah, update, of our post installation list.

The list you previously posted is

backup

dnsmasq

httpd

mysql

nfsserver

postgres

restore

software

tftpd

update

users

I hadn't thought of that but that sounds like a very good idea

Yes, these post-installation task are so boring, but inevitable

So, can we agree on the goal wording and post-installation als example and PoC implementation? Any objection?

No objection from me

OK, no objections so far.

Which brings us to the inevitable question: who will draft the initial version of Ansible and our post-installation tasks?

I can do that

Do we have a list of post-installation tasks?

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-server/installation/postinstallation-tasks/

John Himpel: Yes, in our installation documentation

proposal !agreed We agree on the description of our objectives for Ansible support as set out in the wiki.

I see no objection.

OK, that's it for today, isn't it.?

We made a dedicated step forward.

Tracking ticket: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/server/tickets/issues/190

max 15 mins

With the current movement and campaign away from Microsoft and Big Tech we may expect a growing interest in Linux and hopefully also in Fedora Server. But for many of them, Linux and Fedora Server is a completely new business, and they need a comprehensive, non-intimidating introduction.

That is it's objective.

An Example of Fedora in General:

The idea has been floated to make a Beginners Guide about setting up a home lab

hat's the original from 2017/2018:

With this in mind, I would like peoples opinions about who the target audince for a Server Beginners Guide would be - do we want a corp sysadmin guide, or do we want a home user pathway?

I think we need both?

Both would be nice, the homelab user should probably come first

Im inclined towards the home user, the homelab setup with a number of cool features, bith as this is what I know how to do right away, and it strikes more a a 'beginners' chord with me

I think if we write it correctly, we can address major corp or network type issues, but introduce them in a way that demonstrates say media, filesharing, nextcloud type stuff, ...

Start with a dhcp/pxe instance, describe kickstart, following up with a local mirror of Fedora along with http/nfs, move on to freeipa/ldap, ...

The problem with a more 'professional' guide, is that it coukd snowball bery quickly, and become overly complex

The problem with a more 'professional' guide, is that it coukd snowball very quickly, and become overly complex

that is getting advanced rather quickly

OK, it seems we would / should start with home server / homelab first. And I guess, there is the greater demand.

Best practice for maintainability is to link out to authoritative docs

The biggest challenge might be to promote the command line.

And to take away that fear.

I think anyone picking up a homelab server will be okay with approaching that

And that is why we start with fun stuff

So, I think, the first task is to describe explicitely our goals and then create a proposal for a ToC including 1 sentence as an abstract each?

Would you drop a note in the ticket with these ideas? A run down of what you think makes a server, as it will be different from my ideas, and I\d like to be able to refer to them, and in a few weeks we could go over them together

Sure, no problem

Next meeting I would like to discuss our home server plannings as the main topic.

And then we should open a thread on discussion.

Good idea, there are a lot of homelab enthusiasts there

I'll write down a modified proposal (for home server, not docs) including some clearification from my release party talk.

Out time is up? Nevertheless, maybe short to

We shouldn't skip that permanently. :-)

Anything here to discuss or to pick for next meeting?

a quick personal note

tomorrow is that last day of my current consulting gig

I was supposed to start a new one on Monday

it turns out the new guys haven't finalized my arrival so I may have some time to kill before starting work again

which means I would have more time for Fedora

EOF

We should take advantage of that. 😃

Quick Observation: Migrating from dovecot 3 series to 4 series is a bear. Not for the weak of heart.

Indeed. I did that some months ago. My documtation is ready for publishing.

NEARLY

OK, I suppose, that's it?

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bye

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