The new NODOWS wiki. I'll be moving info over from the trac soon.

nodows > help:
     [echo] Building a nodows appliance are ye? Well, best be fastening yer safety belts!
     [echo] Targets include: patch, build, populate, package
     [echo] You should probably start with work, init, and create
BUILD FINISHED
Total time: 0.2549 seconds

NODOWS is a meta-distribution / tool chain. What the heck does that mean? Well it means that NODOWS is kind of like a linux or freebsd distribution, but you don't run it per se, you use it to build servers and appliances.

NODOWS Intro

What is NODOWS? It is a toolchain to build custom systems, from the outside in. To be more specific, systems like gentoo and freebsd provide an incredible amount of control and customizing when building themselves. Typically these systems are built from the inside out, meaning that a process is running in an operational environment whereby the environment is replaced piece by piece as it is rebuilt. This works very well in many situations. However, some situations involve a target system without the tools that do the actual building work, like the gcc compiler, or the make tool. In this case, another system environment needs to be used to build the target. This process introduces some interesting opportunities and challenges.

We'll leave the challenges for later and for now discuss the cool opportunities. :-) Here's a few ideas that come to mind at the moment:

  • The use of sophisticated tools to do the building (like phing)
  • The use of fast hardware to build optimized system for low power devices
  • The use of sophisticated interfaces (command-line, GUI, webGUI) to build highly secure, inaccessible, autonomous systems
  • Leveraging the phenomenal work that has gone into free software packaging systems like the ports collection, gentoo's portage, and debian's dpkg's
  • The ability to automate the building and configuration of clusters and infrastructure (not to get sidetracked here, but many complex systems require more than one machine, and those machine builds are often tightly coupled in their build and configuration, why not use one tool to build them both?)

NODOWS Plans

NODOWS Ports

NODOWS Source Code

NODOWS source code is stored in a subversion repository.

Write access requires a username and password, currently only Albert Lash has write access.

To view past revisions of NODOWS, please visit the NODOWS section of the Docunext Mirrors project:

NODOWS Hardware

Miscellaneous