Bricking for fun and pleasure

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Marcus Leech <mleech at nortel.com> wrote:
> I bricked a lab machine today by doing an olpc-update joyride-2000 on
> it--it was previously running
>  ship.2 Build 656.

First off, a matter of nomenclature - not really directed at you,
Marcus, but for devel@ in general.

Please don't use the term "brick" unless the machine is *actually*
rendered completely inoperable w/o hardware intervention.  What you
are reporting is just a software problem, and you can recover it
simply using the secure reflash procedure documented on the wiki:
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Secure_reflash

> The system was unbootable, so I asked it to do a "fallback" boot, which
> fell back to the 656 load, but now
>  the "/bin/su" command was made non-executable to ordinary plebs.  This
> effectively prevents me from
>  doing the things I want to do.  Yikes!

This sounds like a valid issue with the rsync upgrade procedure, which
I've filed as http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7158

> Now I *really* need developer keys for the XOs in my lab, so that I can
> cleanly back out of a situation like
>  this.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_developer_keys
  --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )