Upgrade Plans

[C. Scott Ananian]

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/ )