Hi all, I'm working on a project that is based on OpenWRT for what will be a 'live' commercial application. We are giving back are changes (due to a great boss), and my boss is really excited by the failsafe provider restore and I'd like to tell you why in hopes that it will help with the adoption of my preinit and failsafe changes (on which the provider restore depends).
We feel that working with and giving back to the OpenWRT community is
not only good for us, but good for OpenWRT as well. We hope you agree.
The failsafe provider restore is part of what my boss calls a 'next
generation provisioning system'. Provisioning is important for service
providers because they need to get they configurations and updates to
firmware and configuration to many, many routers and in order scale,
need to be able to do so without having to call eash customer, or even
to manually do a firmware and configuration update for every router.
I'll crib from the presentation my boss made for demos
* Next generation auto-provisioning system for [routers; we talk about
our application here]
* Very lightweight, small footprint web 2.0 technologies
* Easy customized for different Service Providers and deployment models
* Designed to by deployed by the end customer, without a truck roll,
and without a tech supoprt call to the Service Provider
Agent:
* When failsafe invoiced establishes HTTP (future HTTPS) session with
server
* If recognized, and authorized, it downloads
* Custom configuration files for specific customer (or for a
particular user group if not a per-router ID)
* Service Provider-specific firmware
* MD5 has to verify file integrity
* Loads new firmware and settings and reboots
* Process can be used for first boot, system upgrade, and brick recovery
Currently for brcm63xx this requires serial console because we don't
have an available reset button. Once the reset button works, failsafe
mode will be able to be entered via reset during failsafe wait period
(indicated by the soon to be availabed LEDs for preinit mode)
Basically if this is in the firmware you can update all your routers by
pressing the reset button, or for certain types of bricking, recover
via reset button. It is also possible to do upgrades of many units in
the field, and with future work we'll be doing, to schedule updates for
routers that stay in contact with us via a reverse connect tunnel.
--
And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early,
now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or
strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore
GnuPG Key Fingerprint 86 F5 81 A5 D4 2E 1F 1C http://gnupg.org
The C Shore (Daniel Dickinson's Website) http://cshore.is-a-geek.com
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