[Tech] Plan to help with guest-mode-only machines

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all,

Christian and I chatted by phone yesterday about the fact that I am
interested in volunteering to help with some Partimus tech stuff. I'm
sending this email in the hopes of being transparent, but know that I am
probably going to only handle replies in a week or two, when I begin
actually working on this project. I'm interested in y'all's feedback,
though, for sure!

These are quick notes, and if I forgot anything or misunderstood a goal or
a constraint, please let me know!

I advise that we set up the following, specifically targeting machines that
operate only in "guest mode".

- Let's (the three of us, but 99% me, so long as you're OK maintaining it!)
write customized tooling that generates a (only slightly!) modified Lubuntu
installer image, targeting generating USB install media.

- The generated installer image should operate with nearly no intervention.

- It should be "dd"-able to a USB thumb drive.

- We should leverage Github and Travis-CI to build this image; that way,
we're all able to submit pull requests to a hopefully straightforward set
of files.

- It should be equally straightforward to use that git repository to build
an image locally (on one's laptop); that way, we can test with "qemu" (or
similar) locally.

- A copy of the image should be hosted somewhere like Amazon S3 or the
Github "releases" system. See:
https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/releases/

- We should additionally set up an APT package repository, and create a
package called partimus-desktop-customizations. We can do the same thing as
above, where it's edited in Github, and auto-deployed via Travis-CI.

- The machines can use unattended-upgrades to auto-update themselves.

- In this configuration, machines would not need a local server of any kind.

- We should expect that upgrading distro (16.04 -> 18.04) would probably
require a reinstall, because we're probably not going to test
partimus-desktop-customizations very well across distro release versions.
I'm OK with that if y'all are.

I'm very open to feedback about if this is an approach y'all would be
willing to maintain. I'm happy to meet up IRL or by phone to discuss, or
you can wait until my prototype to give feedback. I aim to create a
prototype of the above by approx Dec 1, so that Christian and I can discuss
if it meets his needs. If Christian likes it, and y'all like it, we can
"productionize" it.

Here's what I learned about the current situation on the phone call.

- Partimus has a few Ubuntu/Lubuntu deployments to schools and homeless
shelter-type organizations.

- Schools have an interest in students being able to use any computer and
access the files they've stored equally from any machine.

- Homeless shelter-type organizations prefer a guest-mode-only-type setup,
where the computer itself isn't a permanent store of information for users,
but instead if users want to keep some data, they can do it by USB thumb
drive (or cloud service, I suppose).

- There is an ECS (episcopal community services) location in San Francisco
that's the next target of a Partimus deployment. It would be about five
computers.

- Historically, Partimus' lab setups have relied on a server to be an APT
proxy, and a NFS storage server, but guest-mode-only deployments don't
necessarily need this.

- One customization beyond the base install that is needed is adjusting the
list of desktop sessions to only include Lubuntu.

Cheers,

Asheesh.
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