Wireless activation

As part of the Bitfrost security system, laptops with the activation security enabled can be activated through USB, SD or wireless. This page documents wireless activation. The instructions below assume that you have already created the leases that you wish to install wirelessly in the standard JSON format.

Mesh network (XO-1 only)

The XO-1 will look for an activation server over the mesh network. The easiest way to run an activation server is using a working internet-connected XO, as follows:

• Open Terminal activity and run these commands:

sudo su
cd /root
wget http://teach.laptop.org/~mstone/ivan-act-server.tar.gz
tar xvf ivan-act-server.tar.gz

• At this point you should install your leases at /root/actserv/lease.sig, overwriting the lease.sig that comes in the distribution.
• To start the server:

service NetworkManager stop
ifconfig msh0 up
iwconfig msh0 channel 1
cd actserv
./start-activation-server.sh

Your server is now running based on the leases that you provided, and laptops will request a lease from this server during the activation process.

We have found that occasionally the activation server stops responding to requests (this seems to be a low-level problem at the wireless level, i.e. the requests are not reaching the activation server software). Keep an eye open for this and reboot the activation server as required.

The activation process runs a lot faster if the activation server runs on channel 1 (the first channel used by the XOs). So the command sequence above puts the XO on this channel before starting the activation server.

Infrastructure network

NOTE: At the time of writing, this feature is only available in XO-1.5 OS releases.

The activation code will look for an activation server over all open wireless infrastructure networks that can be found. The easiest way to set up such a server is to install a school server which is preconfigured to serve leases over this medium via the XS-activation component.