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

[Daniel Drake]

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.

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:
 - 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"

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

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.

Daniel