[Server-devel] ds-backup testing + OLE Nepal

[Mel Chua]

(Forwarding conversation to server-devel list.)

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 2:57 AM, Mel Chua <mel at laptop.org> wrote:
>  Adding in Bryan Berry of OLE Nepal, who wants to know the status of
>  XS testing, particularly ds backup-restore. Can you folks please fill
>  him in, and let him know how to best get you his team's data?
>
>  Bryan's team is deploying 767 + Activities + XS 0.4 next Thursday at
>  a 15-XO pilot; they have 5 interns and 6 days to test *everything*
>  (acceptance testing). Pretty darn urgent need.

Responding to ds-backup issues first:

If you are doing a USB flash install of 767 on your XOs, you will NOT
see the problem that I saw.  The only scenarios in which I've seen
this is on XOs which started with older installs and been updated with
olpc-update.  Martin has now said that he saw the problem in early
development of ds-backup, but thought it was some randomness on his
test XOs

The problem is easy to detect/correct by hand, simply open a terminal
window and run

ls -l ~olpc.sugar/default/owner.key

and verify the permissions are -rw------- (i.e rw only for the owner).
 To fix run:

chmod 600 ~olpc/.sugar/default/owner.key

You can run the fix on unbroken machines to no ill effect.  I can
verify that machines on which I've fixed the problem automatically
start backing up after the fix is applied.  Final comment, restores
are a known, huge privacy hole in 0.4.  If you know the web page you
can look
at anyone's backups.  For a small test setup, it's probably okay.

Finally, I would strongly encourage finding a way to use a 0.5 build
even if you have to use a dev build.  From what Martin is saying,
0.5 is VERY close and it's base system is going to be much closer to
future releases (said future release will close the privacy hole and
should be a smooth upgrade from 0.5)  Unfortunately, my experience
with 0.5 is very limited.  (see below).

>
>  Bill, is this something the volunteer Boston pilot support team could
>  rally around for a week-long XS setup/test sprint? It would be highly
>  useful to Bryan now, and to the local grassroots pilots (both XO
>  pilots and SugarLabs pilots) in a month or two.

Oh, you mean me. :-)  I have to confess that I've really concentrated
on ds-backup as that is what I personally needed working
the most.  I have successfully followed Martin's notes on setting up
the jabber and related stuff, but haven't touched squid.
OTOH, I'm willing to work things through if the necessary hardware for
XS testing is available at 1CC.  Specific details about
Bryan's network environment would be helpful for duplicating things locally.

As for activity testing, that would probably have to be someone else.

Bill Bogstad