[OLPC-AU] Golden image restores for laptops in shared use scenarios
Jerry Vonau
jvonau at shaw.ca
Tue Jan 18 00:41:23 EST 2011
On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 16:05 +1100, James Cameron wrote:
> Occasionally a laptop operating system needs to be reinstalled for
> testing, or where the laptop is transferred to another owner, or where
> the laptop is shared as a teaching resource.
>
> Reinstalling in the supported fashion costs roughly 20 minutes on an
> XO-1.5, due to the complete block by block rewrite of the internal SD
> card.
>
> Reinstalling a batch of laptops costs 20 minutes for the first one, then
> roughly 50 minutes for the rest, using NANDblaster.
>
> An alternative to a complete rewrite is a filesystem synchronisation,
> from a master filesystem to the target laptop. Only the changes
> necessary are sent over the wireless. This costs about four minutes per
> laptop using the tools I've just written.
>
> Usage scenario:
>
> 1. boot a master laptop that contains a pristine filesystem (or place
> a copy of the filesystem on a server),
>
> 2. for each target laptop, boot using a USB drive, remove the drive,
> and start a script "xo-server".
>
> More detail and tested procedure at:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tiny_Core_Linux/Reversion
>
Like the idea, lets say I have two USB drives, one for the clients and
one as the server, could a osXXX.usb file be used as the source of the
pristine copy in place of mounting a virgin image?
Just thinking out loud,
Jerry
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