oatslite: a small theft deterrence protocol implementation

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's worth noting too that there is no client side implementation of
>> this part of the theft deterrence protocol (yet).
>
> Correct. I've got the patches for that and a couple more things.
> Coming to a git server near you soon ;-)

BTW, do you have any insight into how often the client queries the server?

olpc-update-query --auto -s 1 is called by NM on every connection, and
it does some smart magic in randomly_do_nothing(). The brief time I
spent reading randomly_do_nothing() last night didn't yield any
concrete rule-of-thumb, and it concerns me specially that it doesn't
consider the expiry of the lease it has, so if the lease is about to
run out, we can't count on it to try harder.

A nice fix would be to get randomly_do_nothing() to add the lease
expiry to its weighting, but I'm not sure I can graph all the
variables in my head. For the time being, I have a patch that says
roughly:

  if not lease_expires_soon():
      if randomly_do_nothing():

:-)

with better understandong of randomly_do_nothing() I could do
something smarter. (Related question -- would "smarter" be better?)



m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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