[Server-devel] Transfers between xo and school-server

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>  >  There are many ways of arbitrating access to the backup service, and
>  >  as you pointed out, this should happen without taking much bandwidth.
>  >  See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_backup_restore for a proposal.
>
>  I didn't know about that page. Interesting - but I don't think I'll go
>  for HTTP-based backup/restore.

Well, from my understanding, HTTP is used just to synchronize the work
between the client and the server. The transfer is done with rsync.
The reason for not using just rsync whenever the xo feels like is
because the server is thought to be the one who knows better when the
transfer can happen and how many entries/KB can be transferred in one
go.

Also, HTTP was considered a good choice for browsing the backed-up
data and transferring single entries. This is the point where the SoC
proposal possibly overlaps with backups.

>  >  I would like to know if there already exist any plans about backups. Martin?
>
>  Right now we have the registration process, and that pushes an SSH pub
>  key from the XO to the XS, and creates a system account on the XS, I
>  want to
>
>   - move that "user acct creation" to a chroot or vserver
>   - use it to backup/restore over ssh
>   - initially, use rsync over ssh for the backup (and define a simple
>  scheme to walk the stored data)
>   - longer term, move to a git-like protocol on the wire
>   - at some point, have a git-like storage mechanism on the server
>  side, with a sliding window over time
>
>  the above merits a more fleshed out description but I'm dealing with
>  lousy connectivity atm - so apologies for now...

Sure, I'm happy to have started the discussion.

Thanks,

Tomeu