First impression of Resara server

[Marcelo Bello]

Hi all,

    This is my first post in this community and as such I would like to congratulate the organizations and the people behind Resara server... if implemented correctly this ought to be a huge success.

    My first impression tough was a bit mixed. First impressions are of course very important for young projects like Resara, so I write this email in the spirit of providing constructive feedback.

THE GOOD:

1. First of all let me say that Resara made some smart decisions for the availability of the server. It is available as an installable ISO and also as a VM but alternatively it can be installed from a plain Debian/Ubuntu.

    This is great, I think that allowing for an installation on top of plain Debian/Ubuntu is smart as many people like me doing virtualization experiments will have a snapshot of one of these OSs ready to be deployed into a new VM. Also, some people have very specific installation requirements and the Debian/Ubuntu installer can take care of a lot of those complexities... so that the Resara server installer can be made much simpler. This, by the way, is the approach taken by Proxmox VE which I think is smart.

    Of course, having a ready to fire VM image available for download is also very smart... but please remember of us KVM guys!

2. A Linux AND a Windows GUI for management is a great plus. And it looks easy and pretty which makes it exciting.

THE BAD: Now, a number of things turned me away from Resara server, to the point that I preferred to follow the painful Samba4 HOWTO rather than try Resara server. I am writing the list below in the spirit of providing constructive feedback:

Resara server does not feel like it is being developed by experts:

This was the biggest turn away point for me.

First of all, a 600+MB image is very big for a server appliance, it didn't pass my smell test.

Looking at that in detail I saw that rds and rdsserver requires things such as X11 to install. It just doesn't seem right.

We all know that server configurations must be tight and kept to a minimum.

Last but not least the reputation of Debian for servers is at the moment much better than that of Ubuntu... a Debian 6 base would have been a better choice.

Friendly and pretty is nice and we all value it, but please do tell us what is happening under the hood:

Resara seems to have been developed with user friendliness as a top priority which I think couldn't be smarter. From the page it feels like even my grandma could setup an AD server with Resara and that is a great plus.

However, while even experienced users value user friendliness, do remember that a lot of us out here will not bet on a piece of software without having some basic understanding of what is under the hood.

This is were I think Resara is lacking, I couldn't figure out what is packed within resara and what version of samba4 it is running. 

Samba4 is a moving target, every 3 months or so a new alpha release is coming out usually fixing important bugs.

Resara 1.0 was released in march and seems old already - but is it? Nowhere I could find what version of samba4 resara 1.0 is running and whether samba4 is being kept updated in the repository (like in a rolling distro) or maybe important bugfixes are being backported?

Also, is it a plain samba4 install or has Resara changed the samba4 codebase? Can we have more details as to what is happening under the hood?

Is the Resara project healthy?

Last release in march... last commit in the source repository about a month ago.

For a project so young I was expecting much higher development activity. 

Lack of backup solution in the Community Edition?

I think this is not a wise decision. Of course I can backup myself, but remember that most people will run the community edition if resara becomes popular and you should find a way to cash on that user base.

Look what TurnkeyLinux did with their TKLBAM solution, they offer a backup tool that automatically backup all appliances to Amazon S3 and they make money from storage fees Amazon charges their users. Also, if a TurnkeyLinux appliance dies one can easily launch an EC2 instance and recover the backup automatically... that also is a source of revenue.

Best regards,

Marcelo

[Brendan Powers]

Thanks for your feedback! We appreciate your comments, and I have responded to some of your concerns below.

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Marcelo Bello <marcel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

    This is my first post in this community and as such I would like to congratulate the organizations and the people behind Resara server... if implemented correctly this ought to be a huge success.

    My first impression tough was a bit mixed. First impressions are of course very important for young projects like Resara, so I write this email in the spirit of providing constructive feedback.

THE GOOD:

1. First of all let me say that Resara made some smart decisions for the availability of the server. It is available as an installable ISO and also as a VM but alternatively it can be installed from a plain Debian/Ubuntu.

    This is great, I think that allowing for an installation on top of plain Debian/Ubuntu is smart as many people like me doing virtualization experiments will have a snapshot of one of these OSs ready to be deployed into a new VM. Also, some people have very specific installation requirements and the Debian/Ubuntu installer can take care of a lot of those complexities... so that the Resara server installer can be made much simpler. This, by the way, is the approach taken by Proxmox VE which I think is smart. 

    Of course, having a ready to fire VM image available for download is also very smart... but please remember of us KVM guys!

 

The VirtualBox image is in OVF format. It should be fairly simple to convert it to a disk image that KVM can use. 

2. A Linux AND a Windows GUI for management is a great plus. And it looks easy and pretty which makes it exciting.

 

We also have a version for OSX. 

THE BAD: Now, a number of things turned me away from Resara server, to the point that I preferred to follow the painful Samba4 HOWTO rather than try Resara server. I am writing the list below in the spirit of providing constructive feedback:

Resara server does not feel like it is being developed by experts:

This was the biggest turn away point for me.

First of all, a 600+MB image is very big for a server appliance, it didn't pass my smell test.

Looking at that in detail I saw that rds and rdsserver requires things such as X11 to install. It just doesn't seem right.

We all know that server configurations must be tight and kept to a minimum.

 

The server images we provide include X11, and a lightweight desktop environment. Or, in the case of the ISO, are the standard Ubuntu live CD with our packages added. This is done to make it simple for users not intimately familiar with Linux server administration to install and use Resara Server. APT repositories are provided for users that want to do a custom install.

The rdsserver package, and related libraries link to libqt4gui, which in tern requires the X11 libraries. This is a bug. These libraries don't have any need to require X11.

Last but not least the reputation of Debian for servers is at the moment much better than that of Ubuntu... a Debian 6 base would have been a better choice.

 

We chose Ubuntu over Debian for several reasons. The first being our end users are familiar with Ubuntu and it's release cycle, and we can build off it's live CD system for our ISOs. The second reason is that Debian tends to have very long release cycles. Resara Server is a new project that depends on many fast changing components. Even with Ubuntu's two year LTS releases, we've had to back-port packages. We've learned the hard way with past projects that back porting too many packages can quickly lead to an unstable environment. So, we chose Ubuntu. We get LTS releases every 2 years, and have an easy to use desktop to build on if we need to.

Friendly and pretty is nice and we all value it, but please do tell us what is happening under the hood:

Resara seems to have been developed with user friendliness as a top priority which I think couldn't be smarter. From the page it feels like even my grandma could setup an AD server with Resara and that is a great plus.

However, while even experienced users value user friendliness, do remember that a lot of us out here will not bet on a piece of software without having some basic understanding of what is under the hood.

This is were I think Resara is lacking, I couldn't figure out what is packed within resara and what version of samba4 it is running. 

Samba4 is a moving target, every 3 months or so a new alpha release is coming out usually fixing important bugs.

Resara 1.0 was released in march and seems old already - but is it? Nowhere I could find what version of samba4 resara 1.0 is running and whether samba4 is being kept updated in the repository (like in a rolling distro) or maybe important bugfixes are being backported?

 

We are currently using a git snapshot from sometime after Alpha14. You can look at the rdssamba4 package for more details. We will be moving to Alpha17 in the next release of Resara Server. 

Also, is it a plain samba4 install or has Resara changed the samba4 codebase? Can we have more details as to what is happening under the hood?

 

It's a plain samba4 install. We have a couple of patches to fix bugs, but that's about it. There isn't much magic going on behind Resara Server. Basically, we've written a set of APIs to work with samba4's LDAP server, DHCP, and DNS config files. Then we wrote an administrative interface on top of them. You add a user, we make some calls to Samba4's ldap server to add an object, etc... Of course, there are lots of details. Authentication, RPC, handling Microsoft's odd binary data types, etc... 

Is the Resara project healthy?

Last release in march... last commit in the source repository about a month ago.

For a project so young I was expecting much higher development activity. 

 

We've been working on commercial features for a while. So, our commits have been going to the commercial repository, which is not public. We are working on finishing up version 1.1, and should have something interesting to release when it's done.

Lack of backup solution in the Community Edition?

I think this is not a wise decision. Of course I can backup myself, but remember that most people will run the community edition if resara becomes popular and you should find a way to cash on that user base.

Look what TurnkeyLinux did with their TKLBAM solution, they offer a backup tool that automatically backup all appliances to Amazon S3 and they make money from storage fees Amazon charges their users. Also, if a TurnkeyLinux appliance dies one can easily launch an EC2 instance and recover the backup automatically... that also is a source of revenue.

 

We do not plan to release a backup solution for the community edition. In the future, we will add backup support to the commercial edition.

Best regards,

Marcelo

--
-----------------------
Brendan Powers
Resara LLC

1.888.357.9195
www.resara.com