[RULE] Boot-floppy detect.

[Michael Fratoni]

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On Friday 24 January 2003 04:58 am, Vegard Munthe wrote:

> The floppy is great. Works like a charm.

Excellent, glad to hear it.
 
> The next step (I can do this)
> is to either output report.txt with sed o.o. so that the information is
> presented on screen for a volunteer to write off manually and stick on
> the computer/in the register, _or_ to output a PC ID so the volunteer
> can write this ID on the PC, and then store the report.txt with this ID
> (either in filename or in file) on the floppy so that we later can run
> a new program on the floppy which extracts several reports and fills
> the information into a database.

I've made modifications to the detect boot floppy.

http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/rule/slinky/slinky-detect/slinky-detect-0.0.2.img

The machine is now assigned what should, for our purposes, be a unique 
identifier. The report is also saved using the same identifier.
What I used is the output of 'date +%s' or "linux time" (seconds since 
`00:00:00 1970-01-01 UTC')
It prints this data to the console, so the person running the test can 
easily mark the machine. On a machine here, I got:

Detection complete, data saved to floppy.

     Machine ID: machine-1043448889

(The report is saved to the floppy as "machine-1043448889")

Before writting to floppy, a test for available space is run as well. If 
space is getting low, the user is warned, but the file is still written.

The warning will pop up when space on the floppy drops below 5k, which 
should be more than enough to write several more reports. (The disk has 
about 195k available, it'll take well over 100 reports to fill that.)

> This disk is a great help. After this detect-disk is ready for use, the
> next step (don't think it ever ends! :) for me is to generate some sort
> of automatic testfloppy. This is far more difficult since we have to
> agree on a level of tests that ensures a high percent of faulty
> hardware gets sorted out for further manual tests. Here I was thinking
> on a simple memtest, short write to harddisk test, mouse/keyboardtest,
> and video test. I'm collecting software for this, and will probably be
> using the slinky-detect floppy for this. Today all testing is done
> manually all over the world, and results usually in poor or no testing.
> Therefore such a disk makes a difference, and you have started rolling
> the ball. If you would like to help making these, please do, but make
> sure you think the effort is as rewarding as whatever other work you
> didn't get to do because of this. I especially don't want to hamper
> RULE by bogging one of the maintainers with other work. :)

I'd be happy to help. What software have you selected to date? Pointers to 
URL's appreciated. I'll see what I can come up with.

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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