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

[Asheesh Laroia]

Sure! I can investigate GitLab for git hosting with web hooks. If people
have other suggestions, let me know!

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 12:16 PM Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com>
wrote:

> HI Asheesh,
>
> Thanks for your email.  I have just one response to your email.  Would it
> be possible to use some other resources other than Github, due to the fact
> that the Borg owns Github?  Thanks for considering my request.  :-)
>
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 11:13 AM Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org>
> wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>
>>
>
> --
> Christian Einfeldt
>
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