The last few weeks have been very full. Lots of evil plans in the works some which I must post about later. I’ve done a lot of work to upgrade my Linux web servers that serve http://www.linux.ncsu.edu and various internal custom applications that run on them. Its definitely late in the game, but I have put together a repository for RHEL 4 that has all the requirements for Bugzilla 2.20, MoinMoin, and a few other basic python modules for doing web stuff. Thought I would share.

http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/CLS/CLSTools.EL4/repodata

There have been lots of questions about Current of late and I have been thinking about it a lot as well. Not far behind are thoughts about StateEngine. I wish I had more time to really think and be in the mode to code on my personal projects. However, work and life have kept me pretty busy. Does Current have a future? While Up2date in RHEL will go away the RHN protocol will not. At least, that’s my view on the situation. I have seen and read the patches for Yum to allow it to support multiple different types of respositories. That’s in Yum CVS HEAD now. So I do think Current has a future. I’d like to get Current to support both the RHN protocol and Yum with the ability to require authentication for both protocols. (Not hard with a Yum plugin now.) I’d also like to get the web interface for Current at least as functional as the RepoView tool for Yum repositories. I wouldn’t mind some help there. Depending on what fate has in store I may be able to work on Current much more.

Hunter and I have spoken a lot about StateEngine as well. Hunter has been working on some proof of concept code and some methods to get it to work in a specific way. We both see a lot of value in having the tool know about specific state and be able to pull the relevant files off a preconfigured machine. Store those files and lay them down everytime that state is needed. This implies the use of a repository tree so that the same state can have different files/configuration depending on a default, your department, sub group, lab, or host. (Like SSH keys are normally unique per host not per department.) Thoughts there are coming.