Smolt and Filesystems

Smolt and Filesystems

Mike and I are planning on doing a release of Smolt soon, and I'm trying to get some of the latest features in. I've spoken about two others before, anonymous public URLs and SELinux reporting. I would like to formally announce two more things.

First of all, both the client and server will not be backwards compatible with older servers and clients. I've decided that because of the apparent privacy issues with the UUID, it would not be sane to support them. Therefore, the first feature is that there is now less code in both components.

Second of all, a file system engineer asked for some detailed reporting about file systems. I'm still refining what information is filtered out, but we will now store the following information about client machines:

• A list of all the file systems in use, and sizes
• The information that would be available from stat -f for each file system
• A mapping of mount points to file systems only when the mount point is already in the file system package in Fedora (or an equivalent list provided by the distro maintainer or administrator.)

Understandably a /boot partition would not be used in the same way a /home partition would be used. We'll have full documentation of exactly what would be provided by the Smolt client to the Smoon server. There will be filtering controls available through the configuration file, so you don't have to report all those Linux machines that are secretly running on ZFS if you don't want to.