Today John O’Duinn found some new N810s around the office. While they weren’t destined for us, we worked a trade (Thanks Nick!) for some of the devices we have arriving soon.
The new devices still in their boxes
The imaging process that I described in an earlier post requires some time to bake in a staging environment because it requires some fairly significant changes in how the device acts. In the interim I have generated an image for flashing the N810s that still uses the internal raw flash memory. To do this we set up a reference device exactly as needed. After this I generated a new filesystem image (sudo gainroot; mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock4 /opt; mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /floppy; cd /floppy; mkfs.jffs2 -r /opt -o moz-ref-image-v1.jffs2 -e 128 -l -n). Once this was done I transfered the files to my desktop pc and wrote an automation script that flashes the devices. This puts the root filesytem onto the device. For the pagesets used by talos we need to use the internal controlled flash card. For this I have written a script which takes the device files for each plugged in maemo and rsync’s the contents of the drive. Using a helper script I have made this work on 6 devices at once.
Data being transfered to the new N810s
It took a less than one hour to get all the machines from unopened shipping box to running in our staging environment. If everything looks good, I will move these six new devices over to production tomorrow. This is a significant improvement over the multiple hour per device process of setting up a device we used before. This process scales very well. It takes 90 seconds to flash each device with a root file system and is done in serial. Setting up the page set file system took 6 minutes for 6 devices and is done in parallel.
In Staging
I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of 14 more N810s some time this or next week.
