Devel, -= Some background =-
Today on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] There has been a discussion of the security rammifications of an automatic save-nand usb key script: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/security/2008-September/000488.html The immediate use for this script was acquiring system images from the repair center here at LATU in Montevideo for use in tests of upgrade procedures. We need to know if certain failure modes arise commonly on the deployed systems, but presently there are no field samples to test. Because there was not immediate support for signing the script I am using the developer-key approach to copy the images. In the process of this discussion I suggested that a system-copier USB script would be a valuable point-of-entry tool for data analysis of our deployed systems. Currently such a system does not exist, and we consequently lack valuable information about the usage of our systems (XO and Sugar). -= Question =- How are we planning on obtaining simple information such as which activities are most used/downloaded, which ones generate the most data, common software failures, bug manifestation rate etc.? -= Proposal =- The diagnostic process could be as simple from the country's perspective as: 1) dropping a USB key containing the system-copier script into the machine in question booting, and waiting for shutdown, 2) then inserting the system-copier key (now containing an image of the target system) into an XO running an XS build with a diagnostic script attached, 3) which produces a report and automatically sends it to a server on our end for further analysis. Alternatively a future firmware could provide a menu to all users which included a nand-save script, but this would not be useful until deployed systems were upgraded to run it. We could request that, in order to better our software development efforts, that a repair center executes this diagnostic process randomly on machines which come in from the field with problems that are most-likely hardware-related. -= Comments =- Such a system would have been extremely useful during the recent NAND Full crisis. During this event hundreds of laptops had to be sent back to the Uruguay's repair center because their NAND Flash filled with junk data created by http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5637. Obtaining information about the problem an the state of the machines proved to be a bottleneck in the resolution process. Thoughts? Best, Erik _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
