OpenWireless
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EFForg
Make auto-updates somehow non-disruptive?
If we run update.py from crontab, sometimes the router is going to find an update, successfully apply it, and them reboot, all silently with no warning, and entailing dropping all currently live NAT sessions and interrupting network connectivity for a bit.
Is there a way to warn the user or to somehow do the update less disruptively?
Our current plan for this is to make auto-updates happen between 3:00 and 5:00 local time, but there are other options. jsha has suggested allowing an auto-update at this time only if the data rate on the private network has also been very low for some period of time.
The updates are currently set to run at 3:00. I'm not clear on whether there's a reason to randomize them over the span of 2 hours if the minute is minute is already randomized.
The heuristic of checking the data rate on the private network does seem like it would be super-worthwhile.
BTW, I realized after implementing it that the current randomization (pick one offset and first boot and stick with it) is incorrect because it creates a somewhat identifying time signature for a given router, which we're trying to avoid. We should probably modify it to randomize on each fetch attempt, as originally planned.
Yes,thanks for catching that. I was going to mention to Seth that we want randomization at every attempt rather than a one shot.
This is now mostly done but we should still leave an issue open because we want to ensure that the update is delayed if a local user is actively using the router.