Status - 2007/07/02

Here's a quick rundown of the current status of this project...

I've created the base platform with the minimal services necessary for the things that will be running on the host. This includes xinetd (for VMware Server), httpd (for management), rPath Appliance Agent (for updates and basic server management), open-iscsi for shared block device connectivity, and the rest of the basic services (udev, hal, ssh, etc.).

I've started work on the heartbeat portion of the configuration, as well. I'm trying to decide whether to use heartbeat 1.x configuration style, which actually seems easier to me, or heartbeat 2.x configuration style, which would require parsing XML files. I'm actually leaning to 2.x, just because there are some nice things that 2.x configuration brings with it, but if it proves to be too difficult I won't spend too much time on it.

Other than that, I have a lot of work to do. Once I get some basic configurations nailed down on my test systems here I'll starting working on the web interface for easy management - not a task I'm looking forward to doing. I'll need to start by creating a basic user interface template - something to define how the page will be laid out, what fonts will be used, etc. - then I'll need to create a class for management functions. After that it will be a matter of implementing each component of the interface - parsing configuration files, creating new files, etc. I might use sudo to accomplish the tasks that need to be run as root (much the way Openfiler works), but I also might look at the suexec module for Apache and try to run things as the user who actually logs in to the interface. We'll see...

Anyway, that's today's status - I'm going to try to work on some of this today, but tomorrow's status may be the same...