IoT management

[Andy Monis]

All,

I work for https://anthropos.io/ and we currently use stretch lite on pi3b as our core os.
We have been investigating the use of Fedora IoT as a replacement given some of the
advantages that lib-ostree promises.

With regards to using and deploying fedora, or hub is relatively simple, therefore we have
been installing our software directly via rpm-ostree ( rather than using containers ).
Most of the software is either Python or JavaScript, which leads to the question of, what
is the best (current) approach for working with package managers, in this case pip3 and
Npm, which make assumptions about what directories are available to install into. My
current solution is to vendor all of the dependencies in the rpm.

Further to this, if there is a problem, currently we have the ability to ssh to the hubs
and administer ( sudo x y z etc ). However in the Fedora, most of the filesystem is
protected, which is good. However is it possible to “check out” the current filesystem to
allow some modification, then at a future point either “revert” or “stash” the changes to
put the hub back inline. The purpose here is to allow an emergency change to a specific
device without having to re-package rpms etc if required.

Regards
Andy Monis