[Trac #1431] OFW scripts to enable recovery or installation from school server or anther laptop

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#1431: OFW scripts to enable recovery or installation from school server or anther
laptop
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 Reporter:  jg                   |        Owner:  lwalter42
     Type:  defect               |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  high                 |    Milestone:  BTest-4  
Component:  ofw - open firmware  |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:                       |  
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Comment (by wmb at firmworks.com):

 If the school server were running an NFS server, you could do:

  ok  copy-nand nfs:\nandXXX.img

 That should work right now.  The school server would have to respond to
 DHCP requests from the laptops.

 Installing from another laptop would be a bit trickier.  If the good
 laptop had additional mass storage, you could do the NFS thing.  But if we
 assume it has to be a base-case XO with nothing extra, the best you could
 do is clone its NAND image into the other XO.  Cloning an active JFFS2
 filesystem would be dodgy, so you would either have to use a kernel that
 is running completely from RAMdisk, or else use OFW.

 OFW does not have an NFS server, but it can serve HTTP.  We could fiddle
 with the OFW HTTP client so that copy-nand could stream from HTTP to NAND,
 and set up an HTTP server on the good XO to dole out its NAND image.  We
 would have to work out some sort of rendezvous mechanism.  Maybe when you
 start the server it could display some sort of rendezvous key.

 Afterwards, the cloned XO would have to do something to erase the
 personalization info (host keys, user files, etc) that it inherited.
 Perhaps that could be added to the Linux startup scripts, so that the
 system would re-personalize if the serial number doesn't match the one it
 was first personalized on.

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1431#comment:1>
One Laptop Per Child <http://laptop.org/>