Flock 2025 How We Use Fedora Server Edition

Yeah. Okay. Um hello everybody. Uh thank you for coming. Uh today this talk will be on uh the server edition of uh Fedora. Uh how people use it uh in what environment they use it and how we discovered uh all of this. So yep. Okay. Uh my name is Emmanuel Son. I work for a company that is in the insurance business that has requested to stay anonymous. This means that you can find out its name by checking my LinkedIn profile, but never mind. [cough] Um, this company has a heavy reliance on real Red Hat Enterprise. Uh but at home I use Fedora and uh since I have a couple of uh SBC's at home that I uh tinker with uh I use Fedora server at home. >> I'm Peter Boy. I'm a sociologist by major and my minor is applied mathemat mathematics which was the home for computer science the academic home for computer and science at the beginning of years beginning of this yeah thousand years well I'm 20 years ago I started to organize as a side job so to speak to organize the IT equipment of our of various of our research departments I started with AIX as a middleware that's we soon switched to um scientific Linux and when it's or a mix of scientific Linux and Fedora Fedora the usual case we need this newer software something like that and when um scientific Linux were keys down I had a short trial of CentOS but then switched everything of our servers to Fedora uh it's not not not such a a great number. It's a 25 boxes about um but I didn't expect any degrading in u in working in stability and so on and so I'm convinced Fedora server is a good solution for the normal everyday service server operations and um well and that's is the common goal of the server working group as well. Okay. Um about a year ago, uh at uh last year's flock, we realized that we there was a lot of things that we could do and we uh didn't know whether our users would profit from uh this work. Well, which part of this work would profit our our users the most? Because we had no idea uh what our users were using Fedora Server with or or in what environment they were using it. So we came up with the idea to create a survey uh promote this survey in Fedora magazine and uh at events like Fossim and encourage people who use Fedor server to fill this in so that we could have a better idea of what they do. Uh one of our members uh Stephen Dailyaly yeah uh Mo West uh became the point man uh for the survey. Uh so we went through a couple of iterations. We decided to limit our questions to 10 questions because we wanted we didn't want people to give up halfway through the survey because they they realized they were 25 questions and they were going going to have to spend hours filling it in and the results. >> Yeah. Don't get too excited about it. Probably enterprise about the enterprise centric because the blue line is the blue color is a nose you know the nose have it um unfortunately at the first site I was happy but a closer look at the reveal the problem well nevertheless um our as as I told you we are focused on the professional use of Fedora server um and so we are quite happy we are in the enterprise it's about five or 10% not that much but uh we are a bright bleeding edge distribution and so I think we it's a good idea that we have at least five to 10%. And we have a good representation in the professional use. Professional use in the definition here means using in a home office, using for professional development, using in small to medium businesses I think is the word that in that region. Well, and our big surprise was the last line. Of course, we were aware that Pedora servers use at home, but um we didn't focus on it and well, we accepted some we um expected some usage but not that one. 90 about 90% of the participants were using Fedora server at home as a home lab not home lab as a home server home lab is our definition it included private development as a p not professional development but private development um well it was unexpected in that in that extent and we want to well we did the survey in order to better fulfill requirements expectations of our users. So we have to refocus a little bit. On the other hand, we wanted to stay with our focus on the professional usage. Of course, we are known as upstream redhead enterprise and home server focus would be nice quite uh misleading. So we came up with the idea to keep the focus on the professional usage the top two bars and to introduce probably introduce a home server spin-off of Fedora server. Um it's in the discussion we are not but I have to do to look for my list for a moment. Yes. Um it's in the discussion. Nothing is decided yet. We wanted now we want now to start a discussion about this. Well, if we do a homelap ex um um homelap spin-off, we want we don't want to to create um just another boring device so to speak. We want to to create something dedicated, something special. Various ideas are around for instance environment friendliness. So we can concentrate on low power consumption and less or low heat transmission. Of course affordability would be a critarium. Um definitely we want intend intended to be a replacement used for the right usage of commercial nest mini servers. Our hypothesis is Fedora tools, especially cockpit and ensible offer a similar easytouse administration as these commercial boxes, but they are lightweight, perform better, and especially they are perfectly customizable, which with which commercial boxes definitely are not. Well, and we want to provide a real um a readyto-use installation in pre-installed a typical set of software, but we don't know what the typical set is, but that's a question of the community. Um, and of course, we want to rely completely on Fedora based software, not something external. and my ideas to to try to well it wasn't it's our ideas but I started it I had some expend I have some ex um experiences with so-called participated software development that is to include potential customers in the development process at early stage I want to come up with these methodology and try try it out if it works for Fedora Fedora And if it helps us to broaden our user base well and we will the current plan is to initially start with two ARM devices to disk 5. I did some experimentation with risk 5. It's early stage but it works and um the N 100 um mini server something like that and a really mini server for instance something like urine we have an N100 processor too and quite affordable that's a current discussion um I don't know where it leads to at the moment but we will start hopefully broad discussions in net. Well, okay. That's you are the next [laughter] [clears throat] uh what I was interested uh in the survey was uh what people use Fedora uh for once they have installed it, what do they load up on it? Uh this is the responses we got. Uh some this is more or less what I expected. Uh I I knew uh web applications were going to be the the most uh most used uh reason. Um and some of it some of it is disappointing uh considering how uh good Fedora server works as a domain controller. I would have expected it to be higher well lower on the list. Hi Alex. Uh, and uh, >> I'm sorry. >> Can can you give him the mic? >> Um, so don't get spoiled by these numbers because uh, you don't need to have as many domain controllers as you want to have application servers. So you for example in free APA we typically recommend to have two domain controllers per several thousand of clients enrolled into it. So you get this ratio going there. So we we see here like 10%ish of the um of the overall base um used for organizing the network and that I would say abnormally high actually. So this is the interesting part out of this review. Yep. Uh where was I? Yeah, this is more or less what I expected. uh domain controller uh free API came up quite a lot. Game server, a lot of people use uh Fedora as a Minecraft server. Interestingly enough, um web server is all over the place from Ruby on Rails to Pearl going through Python, NodeJS and everything else. Uh backup server is a duplicity something called Borg Borgmatic. Uh some people just use rync to [laughter] to upload stuff and uh anyway this is pretty much what we expected and uh since one of the goals of the fedora server sig is to provide unsible uh roles uh for whatever you use uh fedora server for this is going to uh be well we're going to prior prioritize certain role certain unsable roles uh based on this uh data. [laughter] So we had uh we we had a number of questions. One of them was which fe feature do you wish was part of the fedora server edition? uh which is the one feature you would want. Out of 587 responses, 330 uh people did not reply, which I interpret as saying there is little to improve in the in in the in the addition itself. Of the 257 uh other responses, more than uh somewhere between a third and a half [snorts] of them uh explicit explicitly said uh there is little to be changed in the in the addition and the rest focuses on uh having a minimal installed that is even smaller than the current minimal install. Uh some people want open ZFS which I'm not sure is going to happen anytime soon. Uh some people some people just wrote the word butterfs which I could mean that they want it to be the default or which means which could mean that they want it removed from the list of file systems that you want that you can choose from. uh uh quite uh four four or five people mentioned that they wanted Rasby P5 support because uh the P5 is much more powerful than the P4 and uh can be of much more use as a as a server than the previous generations and um others uh some people wanted more cockpit integration. Some people wanted cockpit not to be part of the of the main install [laughter] because they they really like their minimal install to be as minimal as possible. And um yeah, Stephen uh please give them the mic. >> U so speaking as someone who had been on the server working group from its uh inception, the minimal install is not server edition. Uh yeah, I think that I think that may be a thing that we have we didn't make sufficiently clear. And I've actually dabbled with the idea over the years of actually taking the Fedora custom OS uh option off of the install media just to make it clear that what we are selling is a we're not selling but what we are providing is a curated opinionated uh package set >> not uh not a playground. Exactly. You should if you get server edition what you're getting is a certain minimum set of expect of functionality that you can always expect to be there. So well that was my highly opinionated reply. >> Someone behind you wanted the the mic. >> Just a quick question. If you take minimal off that's the only reason I use server edition. [laughter] Where else would I get minimal? >> Well, the uh so the network install uh for Fedora in Fedora does include a the option to pick something minimal or or custom, but uh at that point it's a >> yeah the everything installer allows you to do nothing to install basically nothing as well. But >> yeah, >> this isn't okay. >> Uh so we were talking about this yesterday and we realized that we were never going to make everybody happy and uh so [laughter] case in point and uh what we another part of the the reason we want to promote Ansible uh uh role uh roles and playbooks is to allow people to customize uh the their instance after installation. Uh so something like software removal could be part of that. >> Yeah. Documentation. >> We also asked people what they wanted uh to see uh changed in the documentation. >> Documentation was my entry in the engagement in Fedora's edition server. Fedora server edition uh until I grab my deep myself deeper into the issues deeper as initially think but I'm quite content with the reaction to documentation it is the path exactly the path we are trying to develop the the documentation for the last two years about a bit I'm a bit astonished about the apartment is okay but bit astonished about kubernetics we hadn't it's uh well we weren't aware of it we had been but we are we were not and um the same with with kickstart um well we are aware of it it's on the plan for for a year or so but until now we didn't found someone to write the documentation but it's a no incentive to to urgently find someone to do it. And there's another short short notice um issue with docu or task of the documentation web services is a the most used service and fedora service and fedora unfortunately is quite outdated in its web service uh support. we install just like 10 years or 15 years ago we have a main web server and we don't install HPS by infor by by default and something like those. So well I I wrote a backup more than a year ago but it ended as you as often with Fedora there are no resources and the bug was closed with a new edition with a new release. So we are using currently um what we start to use documentation and the toable um enable board um well to fix something which would we have to fix in the in the RPMs but it doesn't happen. The issue is um if you install the default if you use the default installation to to um to set up one server, you get a different um you get a different um document route and you get different name services. Um because well but our default installation install the default install the default SSL virtual host but uh default virtual host is it doesn't exist anymore. It was Apache 2 3 or 22 or something like that. Since then there is no underscore default underscore default ser anymore. So we have used demon documentation a bit to fix some things we should fix other. Okay. Yes. Okay. Uh be before Q&A we wanted to thank uh some people. uh Steve Dailyaly who is not here because he's American and didn't want to make the trip uh was the pointman for the service. He spent uh an enormous amount of time on the survey refining it over and over again uh until it was finally ready. We also want to thank Justin Wheeler who is running around somewhere uh who gave Steve access to the lime survey uh server so that he could publish the the survey and who gave uh both of us uh access to the results so that we could actually prepare this talk uh that was back at Fosen and uh finally we want to thank everybody who participated in the survey. Uh this is very useful data and uh we we are going to put it to good use and finally questions anybody >> I have more comment uh thing u I feel it was was very interesting data and it seems like yeah people are interested in more like profiled use of of server for specific purpose and you're interested in creating these examples. So on behalf of cockpit project, I would say we would be really interested in um finding ways to describe this um higher level use cases because cockpit right now I think uh works on a lower level like you have storage screen to configure storage. you have like networking screen to configure network but you don't have in cockpit a screen to configure lanti server as a game server right and you have this use case where fedora server is used as Minecraft but like let's talk instead and so I think the interesting um development of this would be to figure out this higher level use cases and to create dedicated set of like plug-in for cockpit and also with this web UI effort Now we can basically reuse if plug-in is created for cockpit we can reuse it in the installer and again if you're installing Fedora server for lanti game server you would be able to basically configure your main test installation from that screen and then like manage it from the cockpit screen. So this would be for me the a very interesting development of this whole concept. Uh uh first of all uh in the others category in the documentation uh we had people who wanted to uh know how to develop extensions for cockpits or modules for cockpit. Uh I really need to go through the survey and uh send you feedback. >> So cockpit actually has the uh starter kit repository on GitHub which is your like boiler plate for a plug-in. you clone it and then you add like three lines of uh HTML to and you create your page in cockpit. I did it myself. It's it was actually quite easy. So take a look. >> Well, it's most interesting Stean and I we had a discussion yesterday just about that and uh but to my knowledge cockpit is too far away, too complicated, too. It's very diff but I see it's I'm probably wrong or I'm hopefully wrong. So give it a try. I I will come to you with an example >> probably come. So one one thing related to that is that we have plenty of documentation elsewhere. We have >> we have plenty of documentation elsewhere in the upstream projects everywhere. Uh we have very bad way of discovering that and especially with the search engines going in wrong direction by not really promoting the actual content that people can search but promoting some artificially generated crap >> of that content. uh the the documentation linking uh within the Fedora server might become a very useful point, a focus point for the people to discover stuff like what Alexandra were talking about uh with the U like okay how I can extend or configure screens on my Fedora server. Here's how you find the starter kit for cockpit integration and point to their upstream documentation so that people go and start with the U Fedora server documentation and then discover I don't know Samba uh free APA cockpit and the others uh documentation. Uh it will certainly help us to centralize the thinking through use cases because then we can control what we put under those use cases, how we structure links to that external documentation where needed and so on. Just a short answer, it's my doc, my doc engagement, doc's engagement. Um it is yes the rule is or I try to um to establish a rule always to have to add a link to the upstream projects in each of the Fedora documentation and to limit document Fedora documentation to those things which are specific for Fedora and not a repetition of general upstream documentation. But my power is limited. So, um, and I forgot that myself at the beginning. I'm on the way to add these to the Fedora documentation. >> Yes. [laughter] Okay. Thank you very much. Anyway, [applause]