[ Thanks to Ross
Laver for this link. ]
“Many companies see a market for so-called ‘Internet
appliances’. An Internet appliance is a box which plugs in and
provides you with Internet access, a firewall, file and print
services, e-mail access and so on. While most Internet appliances
include hardware (for example, Sun’s Qube and Rebel .com’s
Netwinder), an Ottawa company called e-smith Inc. provides a
software-only In-ternet appliance.”
“E-smith’s software is based on Red Hat Linux 6.1 (as of e-smith
version 4.0). It installs on a standard PC and turns it into an
Internet appliance. I recently visited e-smith and saw a demo of
the software, as well as a peek into the internals of the design.
Here’s how it went….”
“The e-smith architecture is very well thought-out and
maintainable. All of the configuration files (like Samba’s
smb.conf, Apache’s httpd.conf, and so on) have been analyzed by the
e-smith programmers and broken down into small chunks. These chunks
are then stored in separate template files, with a numbering scheme
similar to many Linux distributions’ System-V ‘init’ scheme. In
essence, file names begin with two-digit numbers so that, when
files are concatenated in sorted order, they yield a correct
configuration file.”