COMP 3000 2011 Report - Part 1 of 3: Inquisitor

Background

Name

As you may have already guessed the name of my chosen distribution is Inquisitor.

Goals and Target Audience

This distribution aims to provide an open-source hardware testing and certification system, that is:

• Customizable: it is possible to pick and choose which modules and tests to include.
• 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. This will be described in greater detail in later parts of the report. Please stay tuned!
• Flexible: it is possible to adjust virtually any parameter in analysis or testing process and customize the system to the widest extent possible.
• 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.
• Distributed: through its modular architecture, Inquisitor can be easily distributed accross a cluster to distribute load or make a geographically distributed system.
• 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!

Who Develops it

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 To Get It

Inquisitor may be obtained via the official website. 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 'flavors' 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 the 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 those 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.

How Large is it

The size of each of the aforementioned 'flavors' 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.

Influences

ALT Linux is used as the base and starting point for Inquisitor.

Miscellaneous

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.