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| -rw-r--r-- | doc/articlefak-concept.tex | 7 |
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/doc/articlefak-concept.tex b/doc/articlefak-concept.tex index bb3a73a..ea7f61a 100644 --- a/doc/articlefak-concept.tex +++ b/doc/articlefak-concept.tex @@ -17,11 +17,12 @@ On the following Monday he gets help from the informatics office in his universi /section{ What is Firstaidkit } Firstaidkit is an automated recovery tool that brings together common recovery processes and applies them to a system. The way that Firstaidkit handles the recovery processes is by means of plugins. The idea being that a plugin will focus on a particular issue in the system, like grub, init scripts or xserver. Firstaidkit is designed to automatically fix problems while focusing on maintaining user data integrity. In other words, Firstaidkit will try its best to fix your system while maintaining your data intact. Here we can recall Joe's situation. Lets recreate the end of the story with the only difference being that Joe had Firstaidkit on a rescue disk or liveCD. Joe just wants his computer to boot, he knows that he somehow shot himself on the foot, but now he would want an easy way out. In this case Joe may run Firstaidkit in diagnose mode to see what is wrong with his system. Firstaidkit will notice the missing grub in the first 512 bytes of the drive and will tell Joe that he needs to fix his grub. After looking through the Firstaidkit man pages and searching through the plugin list, Joe finds that he needs to run the plugin named "grub". He tells Firstaidkit to run grub in fixing mode and reboots his machine after the process ends. He waits impatiently for the machine to go past the blank screen with the cursor at the top left. When the computer boots normally, Joe is very pleased that all his information was not lost and continues his daily activities. -Joe's situation is just one of many in which an automated recovery tool would make peoples life easier. It also is not restricted to first time linux users, it can also be extended into a lot of administrator recovery tasks like Selinux analysis process, deleted partition recovery process, init scripts recovery, rpm database recovery, etc. The list extends into most, if not all, the OS subsystems. -Firstaidkit will not take care of everything. Being a tool that executes common recovery processes, it needs some context from the existing system to actually get the fix right. If you completely wipe out your hard drive it will be extremely difficult for Firstaidkit to get anything done. +Joe's situation is just one of many in which an automated recovery tool would make peoples life easier. It is not restricted to the linux user that is a beginer and can be extended into administrator recovery tasks like a Selinux analysis process, deleted partition recovery process, init scripts recovery, rpm database recovery, etc. The list extends into most, if not all, the OS subsystems. +But unfortunatelly Firstaidkit will not take care of everything. Being a tool that executes common recovery processes, it needs some context from the existing system to actually get the fix right. If you completely wipe out your hard drive it will be extremely difficult for Firstaidkit to get anything done. /section{ How does Firstaidkit work? } -Firstaidkit is based on a plugin framework that allows different recovery processes to be added to the system with little or no effort. The Firstaidkits user interface (UI) presents a list of these plugins and the user must decide the way in which they will be executed. The plugins can be run in a fully automated way. This means that all the plugins will be run and there will be an attempt to fix whatever issue is encountered. This approach is not reasonable considering the amount of plugins that could exist at a certain point. Imagine running 30 or 40 plugins when all you really need is to change your root password. Additionally, there is no real need to run all of the plugins because the user will have some idea of what the problem is. +Firstaidkit can be considered a list of recovery processes that can be used to recover default value behavior. Most of the time the user will not be looking to do a full system check. Instead a specific subsystem is identified as misbehaving and therefor targeted to be rescued. The trick here is for the user to know how that misbehavior is referenced in Firstaidkit. More specifically, what subsystem it relates to. When a machine does not boot the failure can be in a lot of places, but to the user its one problem: My computerr does not boot. Each plugin will have a diagnose that will give the user important information about current state and hopefully point the user in a direction where he can find more information. So when the user runs a diagnose of the sytems messages like "Your initscripts are busted" and "You are missing a boot loader" will jint the user that the problem of his computer not booting is really related to his init scripts and bootloader. Moreoverr, if the user is using a our GUI to he will be presented with red messages advising him of missbehaving subsystems. +Firstaidkit is based on a plugin framework. Each plugin is a recover process that allows different recovery processes to be added to the system with little or no effort. The Firstaidkits user interface (UI) presents a list of these plugins and the user must decide the way in which they will be executed. The plugins can be run in a fully automated way. This means that all the plugins will be run and there will be an attempt to fix whatever issue is encountered. This approach is not reasonable considering the amount of plugins that could exist at a certain point. Imagine running 30 or 40 plugins when all you really need is to change your root password. Additionally, there is no real need to run all of the plugins because the user will have some idea of what the problem is. Another, more rational way of interacting with the system is to pick what plugins will run. Firstaidkit allows the user to see the description of each plgin and decide based on said description the plugins that are needed. This prevents the user from having to execute all the plugins when all he needs is a simple recovery task. So how does the user that knows very little about the system take advantage of the possibility to pick a plugin? He could run all the plugins in diagnose mode, this mode will not take any action but will tell the user if a specific subsystem is working properly or not. After making a diagnose only run, the user has information that could be used to actually decide what plugins to run. Firstaidkit is controlled by ini style configuration files. The system allows to pull any number of configuration files from various places. It also allows the user to specify individual configuration values through the CLI. This way of pulling configuration values from various places can get complicated, so Firstaidkit has the ability of printing the resulting configuration after parsing all the files. |