Desktop features get the press. Jiggly windows are shiny. So here’s your Fedora Planet Boring Management Software Update 
Cobbler: I’ve been working on a lot of features to make Cobbler the best way to install Linux anywhere, regardless of the size of your organization. This means adding in Kerberos, LDAP, ownership controls, more powerful kickstart templating, and (soon) even better web tools for letting your users help manage their own parts of your infrastructure. This is all due for a really loaded 1.0 release around Summit/FudCON timeframe. After that I’m planning on writing a nice CC-licensed Linux Deployment w/ Cobbler manual on datacenter rollout strategy and how to combine all of Cobbler’s features together, best practices, etc — which should provide a good opportunity to learn Docbook/Publican. There also have been some neat patches recently to get Cobbler installable on Debian and managing apt repos as a possible alternative to FAI (Cobbler already supports OpenSuSE and Debian installer files to some extent) — this is cool because mixed Linux environments are a definite reality. For an app that started as a small way to fix the brokenness in system-config-netboot (and also make it do virtualization), it’s really turning into a datacenter management tool in it’s own right, and I’m very happy to see that.
Func: Wow, we were inundated with Google Summer of Code proposals, and it looks like we’re going to get some slots! There are all sorts of exciting things on the agenda, from a web based system-config-*, to simpler asynchronous API calls, delegation of commands between trees, hierarchical call structures, and all sorts of exciting new modules. We really want Func to be THE tool to turn to when your boss says “get me a report on how many webservers have TurboGears installed” or write me a script that “install this virtualized machine on all of my servers in this arbitrary group if they have space”, you know what tool to turn to, and you’re done in a half dozen lines of Python or 1 simple shell command. Basically it will be the go-to scripting system for anything you’d ever want to do with your datacenter/lab/etc — coupled with a really powerful command line — and also being a ultra-simple minimalist framework for building new management application and tools. Func-inventory currently allows you to generate an RSS feed of changes to any stats you choose across your network (you can write your own modules), using git, in around 200 lines of code. I still think the exploding battery checker would have been useful if it came out a year earlier. So those are some examples of what is possible — though the future is really open to what people decide to do with it. Cobbler has been taking most of my time lately, though I’m planning to start switching back and forth more often — Func has a lot of places to go. Stay tuned.
Cobbler and Func are both going be at Red Hat Summit as well as FudCON (content/focus will likely be different). Good deal. Summit was awesome last year, as was the Winter FudCON! If you put them together, we might all die of Linux overdoses, if that is possible
So there’s your Fedora Management Software update. Now back to Tina in the studio.
