[OLPC-AU] Golden image restores for laptops in shared use scenarios

Sridhar Dhanapalan sridhar at laptop.org.au
Tue Jan 18 01:57:28 EST 2011


On 18 January 2011 16:05, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> 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
>
> Risks:
>
> - filesystem corruption of the master laptop would be copied to the
>  other laptops,
>
> - accidental boot of the master laptop may cause side-effects such as
>  loss of collaboration in Sugar,
>
> - minor differences in filesystem allocation may occur, but since the
>  internal storage is non-rotating there should be no significant change
>  to activity response times.
>
> - not supported by OLPCA's deployment support team.

Just so I understand this right, this is (in layman's terms) like a
quick NANDblaster? That is, it can do multiple XOs at a time and it
wipes any customisations and data that they may have?

I'm just wondering how it could relate to our Mini Server project,
which is designed for upgrading. I was planning on making an
announcement about it this week, but here goes anyway:
https://dev.laptop.org.au/projects/mini-server/wiki


Sridhar


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