[CUWiN-Dev] Documentation Help

[David Young]

On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 01:08:40PM -0500, Seth Price wrote:
> So far I haven't received any help with the unsolved mysteries in the  
> documentation that I sent out a few days ago. In an effort to get  
> things moving, I'll request help with some specific simple ones.
> 
> - On the web page http://cuwireless.net/Initial_boot_sequence and in  
> the corrisponding page in the documentation, it says to "configure  
> the boot image on your PXE server to allow root SSH logins to the PXE  
> booted node". It seems that this advice is obsolete with the current  
> image. I would simply delete the paragraph, but I wasn't sure if it  
> is the intention in the future to disable SSH logins by default when  
> the web interface is more complete and/or the nodes operate more  
> reliably?

Delete it.

> - What is the intended direction for building a firewall into nodes?  
> Will it be set up to allow only the services on the ports advertised  
> via zeroconf?

That's a start.  The next step after that is to design a UI for firewall
configuration, and then make a mock-up.

> - How many nodes are in the Urbana testbed and what is the normal/ 
> worst case latency? (I've seen this question asked a lot, but no good  
> answers. Maybe we should find out...)

I have no idea.  Some of this information is on a private wiki.

> - Does anyone have step-by-step instructions for making changes  
> (custom passwords) on the cd images? I've heard that it is doable  
> with a floppy drive...

The CD images don't use any rewritable storage, so you cannot change
the passwords.  Now and again there has been idle talk about using a
floppy or CF card to store configuration, but nobody's taken a first
step in that direction.

One way it could work is that you enumerate the mass-storage devices,
you read the disklabel off of each to find out the partitions, you filter
out all but the UNIX partitions, you mount each partition read-only,
check for the "signature" of a CUWiN configuration partition, skipping
partitions that are missing the signature, try to remount read-write,
skip partitions where you can't.  In this way, you end up with a list
of one or more partitions where CUWiN configuration information can
be stored.  If there is more than one eligible partition, it will be
important to choose all, one, or none....  The configuration information
can be written from the memory filesystems to the configuration partition
with, a command like this, say:

        cd / ; pax -rw < /etc/config-manifest /config-partition-mount-point

It may be a little tricky at boot to read the contents of the
configuration partition before the configuration is needed.  I will have
to think some more about it.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933