Bricking for fun and pleasure

[Marcus Leech]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> 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
>
>   
Yes, I realized right after I sent the original message that "brick" 
carries both more
   emotional, and more technical content than I had perhaps intended. 
Mea Culpa.
>> 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
>
>