Michail needs to run mesh tests on 50+ laptops. He needs an automated way to get slightly customized versions of the OLPC software quickly to all of these. In the next few days I'll be working on hacking together a quick prototype of: a) the part of the "antitheft" server which tells a laptop which software it should have b) the part of the XO which periodically checks this c) code which pushes bits onto the machine d) code which switches to the new image after reboot.
I will coordinate with Ivan to try to get "real" security and antitheft stuff into parts (a) and (b), but my priority will be to get Something Working for Michail's tests, so there will likely be stubs. Similarly, it would be nice if (c) and (d) were vserver-containerized and whatnot, but I'll probably just stub out the vserver bits and use hard links --- as per the previous discussion, the vserver COW is used just to protect the system from a rogue updater, it's not fundamental to the process and hard links will work fine in the prototype. Between parts (c) and (d) there would ideally be Sugar UI code which looked at update priority and deferred reboot or whatnot, but again that will be stubbed out. Finally, there's some controversy about how (c) actually gets the bits onto the machine. I'll use rsync for this initially, because this testbed will also help settle concerns about its scalability (or lack thereof), but I'll make sure that this interface is clean and we could easily swap out some other distribution mechanism (bittorrent, updatinator, or diff-multicast) if benchmarks and testing show it is worthwhile. Basically, I hope to be writing a robust skeleton that lots of different groups can plug their stuff into. If you've already got pieces of this skeleton written, send me the bits. I'll send followup mail with the git repository info once the basic stuff is there. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel