[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Proposal: Lease expiry information display in My Settings -> About My Computer

[Anish Mangal]

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On Wednesday 25 July 2012 10:46 PM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Anish Mangal 
> <anish at activitycentral.com> wrote:
>> I would like to propose a feature for discussion and inclusion in
>> the 0.98 cycle.
>> 
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Lease_Information_Display
>> 
>> This feature is valuable for support staff in deployments which
>> use OLPC's security system built on the XO laptops, and was
>> specifically requested by the OLPC deployment in Paraguay.
> 
> I read the feature page, and I don't really understand the use case
> or problem that needs to be solved. I'm not convinced that changing
> sugar is the right answer, especially when this only affects
> support staff, not regular users.
> 

Well, in a sense, the support staff support our users, so taking care
of them is also important. This might be useful info. for kids in some
cases too (explained later in the email)

> The feature page discusses the case when the lease has expired,
> but this seems like quite the corner case to me. Assuming that XO
> laptops are booted and shutdown on a daily basis, this bit of
> information would only be shown when the following happens:

This information shows the number of days to lease expiration, not
after the lease has expired, and is always shown.

> - The XO is booted in the morning - The lease expires shortly after
> boot - A support staff member happens to pick up that laptop that
> same day, before the laptop gets shut down, and opens "About my
> computer"
> 

One problem they were also trying to get around in Paraguay is that
during vacations, the kids don't go to the schools and hence the
leases expire. If the kids also know about this information, then they
can easily make sure that they don't get 'locked out'

> Any member of support staff that deals with leases is going to need
> to be a little bit familiar with the lease.sig format and
> location. So running "cat /security/lease.sig" at the terminal can
> show the same information - its a little bit technical, but again,
> familiarity is required for this role anyway.

This is EXACTLY what we are trying to get around here. We should not
expect everyone in the support staff (or the kids themselves) to be
proficient enough to open the terminal, type commands, understand
encoded formats etc.

> For the rare occasions when leases need to be checked, running this
> command at a terminal suffices here in Nicaragua at least.
> 

It doesn't in Paraguay, that's why they asked us for this information
to be present in the About my computer section for Dextrose-2.


> It is harder to read the expiry of a sig02 lease from catting the 
> file, but as far as I know those aren't used in Paraguay. If the 
> format is too difficult then perhaps a command line tool in
> bitfrost would be a better solution.
> 
> From a technical perspective, the implementation would need to
> either be quite hacky (parsing lease.sig directly) or use bitfrost.
> Using bitfrost libraries would be OK but the feature page should
> note that this now becomes a dependency of sugar.
> 

Since this feature is only relevant for the XO at the moment, making
use of the bitfrost API would be acceptable to me, but I don't see a
lot wrong here by parsing the lease.sig directly. This file is
supposed to be automatically generated/updated in normal use cases.

> Daniel
> 


- -- 
Anish

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