Tomorrow (November 7th) we’ll be hosting a testday for the Server Product. Members of the Server Working Group as well as QA will be available on freenode in the #fedora-test-day channel to help out with testing. The focus of the testday will be on several facets of the server product:

At this point you might be asking, “What do each of those things do and how would I benefit from testing them?” I’ll try to give a quick explanation of what each of those features are and why they’re important to the Server Product.

FreeIPA

FreeIPA provides your Linux network with its own Domain Controller capable of managing users, groups, DNS, certificates and single-sign-on capabilities. Taken from the FreeIPA website:

FreeIPA is an integrated Identity and Authentication solution for Linux/UNIX networked environments. A FreeIPA server provides centralized authentication, authorization and account information by storing data about user, groups, hosts and other objects necessary to manage the security aspects of a network of computers.

Cockpit

Cockpit is a web based tool for managing and monitoring servers. It takes a lot of the pain out of administering several servers allowing you to do it from one, easy to use, central location. It takes a lot of the pain out of managing all your services, users, containers and pretty much anything your server might be doing.

OpenLMI

OpenLMI is a project aimed at creating a standardized API based on DMTF-CIM for managing your Linux systems. From the their site:

The OpenLMI project provides a common infrastructure for the management of Linux systems. Capabilities include configuration, management and monitoring of hardware, operating systems, and system services. OpenLMI includes a set of services that can be accessed both locally and remotely, multiple language bindings, standard APIs, and standard scripting interfaces.

Rolekit

Rolekit is the tool used to enable the easy deployment of different server roles. It makes it a snap to deploy different kinds of servers, such as web, mail, domain controllers, etc. (referred to as “roles”).

Conclusion

Suffice it to say, Server offers a lot of new and great functionality. So come by for the test day and take some time to get familiar with it’s offerings and make it an awesome release! More information can be found on the wiki – and you can always drop by #fedora-server or #fedora-qa if you have any questions or want to get involved!