Over the last few weeks Rafiu Fakunle, the current developer behind Openfiler, ported his appliance over to rPath Linux and rBuilder. He released a beta on the new platform just a few days ago. The switch to rBuilder and rPath Linux from CentOS shortened his development cycle because of his ability to quickly generate new releases and more easily control specific aspects of package and patch selection Conary.

This is a great example of the application of Conary and rBuilder's power. Rafiu says that the combination of rPath Linux, Conary and rBuilder "reduces the burden on us as it allows us to concentrate on our project rather than on distribution building." A great success story from Openfiler! I hope that we start to see more open source appliances switch to our system, or use rBuilder to show off a cool application in the form of a software appliance, like Gallery recently did.

From Openfiler's web site:

Openfiler is a Storage Management Operating System. It is powered by the Linux 2.6 kernel and Open Source applications such as Apache, Samba, LVM2, ext3, Linux NFS and iSCSI Enterprise Target. Openfiler combines these ubiquitous technologies into a small, easy to manage solution fronted by a powerful web-based management interface. Openfiler allows you to build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and/or Storage Area Network (SAN) appliance, using industry-standard hardware, in less than 10 minutes of installation time.

I didn't know about Openfiler until Rafiu started visiting #conary on Freenode with questions about rBuilder and Conary. It looks like a very cool system, and I will probably be building my own NAS at home based on the Openfiler software appliance. Also, I understand that fellow Planet GNOMEer Mukund Sivaraman is also an Openfiler developer! Hi, Mukund!