COMP 3000 2011 Report - Part 1 of 3: Inquisitor

Background

- The name of the distribution

As you may have already guessed the name of my chosen distribution is Inquisitor. This distribution aims to provide an open-source hardware testing and certification system, that is:

• Customizable: [....EXPAND..... - how does it try to be customizable -]
• Modular: it is made up from a series of interchangeable modules; one can easily add new modules in order to add new test detections, production steps, etc. [.....MORE WILL BE EXPLAINED ON THIS IN LATER PARTS OF THE REPORT.....]
• Flexible: it is possible to adjust virtually any parameter in analysis or testing process and customize the system to the widest extent possible. [.....MORE WILL BE EXPLAINED ON THIS IN LATER PARTS OF THE REPORT.....]
• Intelligent: it is server-based version includes a database that stores all the data on all computers that were tested by Inquisitor making easy to keep track of multiple systems/PCs. If some parts of the hardware were to change, 'clever scheduler' won't redo all the long testing, but only the tests that were relevant to the hardware changes. [.....MORE WILL BE EXPLAINED ON THIS IN LATER PARTS OF THE REPORT.....]
• Distributed: through its modular architecture, Inquisitor can be easily distributed accross a cluster to distribute load or make a geographically distributed system. [.....MORE WILL BE EXPLAINED ON THIS IN LATER PARTS OF THE REPORT.....]
• Scalable: it is possible to test just one computer or all the computers in an organization.
• Free: it is free, and that's always good!

It is being developed by Mikhail Yakashin and another 5 guys, with various contributions from others, the full list of names can be found below:

Inquisitor team is:

  * Mikhail Yakshin 

Pavel Melnikov Maksim Bartenev Sergey Matveev Denis Borovikov Andras Horvath

With contributions and suggestions from: Anton Farygin Anton Kachalov Valery Inozemtsev Alexandra Panyukova Michail Pishchagin - how it may be obtained Inquisitor may be obtained via the official website (http://www.inquisitor.ru/download.html). Currently it seems that only a direct download is available, but there is a heading for BitTorrent, so who knows it may also be available as an option in the future. There are several 'flavours' to choose from; there is a standalone version, a live version, and an enterprise version. Standalone version, installs into whatever Linux OS system you are currently running by modifying a configuration makefile with your current system parameters. This is probably best for "demonstrating and learning Inquisitor" as stated by the people working on the distribution. Live version, is a Linux Live CD option that allows you to boot straight from the CD/DVD. A good choice for that are afraid to accidentally mess something up on their system when running destructive testing and for those that don't have a Linux OS installed on their machine. Enterprise version, allows the user to setup a dedicated testing server that would allow any computer to boot from the network using the PXE protocol in order to test multiple computers on a regular basis. - its approximate size The size of each of the aforementioned 'flacors' is relatively small and only took a couple of minutes to download via my connection at home. The distribution is zipped, and version 3.0 is under a megabyte in size. When unzipped it is just under 2 megabytes (1.95). The iso for the Live CD version of the distribution is 131 megabytes for 32-bit systems, and 135 megabytes for 64-bit systems. - its heritage (what other OS distribution(s) is it derived from) ALT Linux is used as the base and starting point for Inquisitor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALT_Linux)

Any other background information is relevant for understanding the rest of the report. - 'Clever scheduler' describe further -----

References

All references used in proper bibliographic form. Must cite these sources in the main text as appropriate.