Deployment image customization

[pgf at laptop.org]

morgan wrote:
 > On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 18:29, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
 > > On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
 ...
 > >> The biggest challenge I see is to find those things which you do not want to
 > >> "clone" from the source XO. The only things that come to mind are Name and
 > >> Color. We could even pre-fill them as long as those dialog boxes come up at
 > >> start up.
 > >
 > > There is a lot more than that - it's things that are invisible to the
 > > user, technical details of the system, which are the bits we don't
 > > have a good answer for. For example (an easy one), keys are generated
 > > on first boot, but it is potentially bad news down the line if
 > > multiple XOs have the same keys. The hard part is tracking these
 > > things, which are not specified anywhere and there's no one place you
...
 > I believe the mail from Michael that you were looking for is
 > http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/012200.html - and
 > http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012957.html is
 > probably also relevant.
 > 
 > The keys generated in ~/.sugar/default/ are AFAIK not used for crypto,
 > but are used to generate the unique Jabber ID (JID). If two XOs (or
 > Sugar clients) have the same keys, Strange Bad Things happen to
 > presence and collaboration.

ssh host keys are probably generated on first boot as well.

with partitioning support, it should be possible to have a r.o. root
overlaid by a unionfs writeable mount, so machine-specific changes
don't modify the released partition.  this would make cloning quite a
bit easier, i'd think.  i have no idea what the performance hit of
a unionfs setup would be, nor how such a partitioning would fit
into the rest of the update strategy (e.g.  olpc-update).

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
 give one laptop, get one laptop --- http://www.laptop.com/xo