Now for my next trick....

In looking for my next challenge, I have decided to step away from the Oracle stuff for now and am going to try my hand at something down the stack.

I have used Openfiler for a while whenever I need a 'quick-and-dirty' SAN for any of my projects. It does the job I need it to do, but is getting a bit long in the tooth - the last official release was over 2 1/2 years ago. A significant problem is that it is based on the now-defunct rPath Linux distribution. About this time last year, Openfiler announced they would be moving back to a CentOS based distribution, releasing a preliminary download, but nothing has been heard since.

So I have decided to take up the baton.

Based on what I have seen so far, I am going to have to learn a lot more about the ins-and-outs of Linux storage, authentication, kernel building, rpm packaging and PHP than I ever thought I would, but maybe that is a positive thing.

My initial goal is to get the current Openfiler functionality on a vanilla CentOS 6 install, using only currently available repositories (i.e. CentOS, EPEL, ATrpms et al).  I want to avoid having to maintain my own versions of code that already exists. As an example I have found so far, Openfiler relies on getting an XML representation of the output of 'authconfig'. The current version of 'authconfig' does not produce this output. Given 'authconfig' is a Python script, it is reasonably easy to put the functionality back in, but then I would be left having to keep track of developments in 'authconfig' and maintaining my own branch.  In the tradition of UNIX, I would rather develop something that can take input from the standard 'authconfig' and output what Openfiler needs.

Once I get the basics of presenting the core storage services going well on stock CentOS code, then I might start looking into things like SCST and DBRD/clustering.

I think my biggest problem is going to be stopping from jumping all over the place and just focusing on one piece at a time :-)

Anyway, expect semi-regular updates on my progress. And help or advice is always welcome.