[Status Report - Week 05] Automated Kernel Crash Reporting System

[Tzanetos Balitsaris]

Completed tasks for this week:

* Research about the programming languages that are used for server  
side programming. Decide to use Python instead of PHP for the  
construction of crashreportd and the various components of the Server  
side part.

* Study Python and its standard library and writing test programs to  
familiarize myself. Then, I wrote the second version (primitive and  
incomplete) of crashreportd (usr.sbin/crashreportd) written in Python.

* Minor change in crashreport (usr.sbin/crashreport): change the  
directory that reports will be send to the server from /home/reporter  
to /var/spool/crashreports. In server, created the directory  
/var/spool/crashreports as root and then chown to reporter.

* When coding the crashreportd program, I realised that the crash  
reports have not a compact and strict form. This leads to a harder and  
more buggy code in the server side part and more load for the server  
machine. So, I decided to organize the structure of the reports in the  
client side part while bundling the report and then send it to the  
server. If the report does not follow the rigid rules of how a report  
should be, then it will be discarded from the server. Also, with this  
approach we reduce the chances of accepting a fake or most important,  
a malicious report. The implementation of this thought is under  
constuction and it will be ready in the following days.

* Update the FreeBSD Wiki page of the project

-- 
Tzanetos Balitsaris

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