OTA updater source available?

Volumio Development
#1

I’m curious whether the sources for volumio-remote-updater are available. I don’t see anything pertinent in the list of repos for the Volumio GitHub org, and all of the references to the updater in the build scripts are to binary packages on repo.volumio.org (e.g., here). Likewise, Googling site:repo.volumio.org volumio-remote-updater yields only references to the same .debs mentioned in the build scripts.

Is this code hosted somewhere obvious and I’ve somehow missed it? Or maybe is volumio-remote-updater proprietary, and the apparent absence of publicly-available source is on purpose?

Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer!

#2

Hi!
Yes, the updater is not open source. It is why you can’t find sources on GitHub.

#3

Yes, the updater is not open source.

Thank you for confirming this. Do you happen to know why the updater is closed source?

Context: I have a Cubox-i, which is no longer officially supported (or at least doesn’t have any versions newer than 2.774 available on updates.volumio.org, AFAICT). I’d like to self-host OTA updates for my device, but volumio-remote-updater doesn’t appear to be end-user-configurable in any straightforward manner. I wanted to take a peek at the source to see if I could figure out things like the form of the HTTP responses that volumio-remote-updater expects, what HTTP requests it makes, what commands it runs after downloading an update, etc.

Guess it’s time to break out binutils, strace, mitmproxy, and friends!

Thanks again for the clarification of the source availability, or (as it turned out) lack thereof.

#4

@tomeon I am in a similar boat w.t.r OTA . A lot of my devices are either not yet supported, community builds, or run much newer stuff than default Volumio.

I spent some time initially poking around and deconstructing the OTA updater, and had a really rough client implemented. I didn’t spend much time figuring out what the server does, as my aim was to serve my own updates. I did manage to get my client speaking to Volumio’s servers, but then life came in the way before I could implement my own server.

So now I just continue building fresh images, and flashing SD cards like a caveman :expressionless:

#5

@ashthespy –

I spent some time initially poking around and deconstructing the OTA updater, and had a really rough client implemented.

Nice, an existence proof :). Any chance this code is publicly available somewhere? Checked your GitHub profile and nothing jumped out.

So now I just continue building fresh images, and flashing SD cards like a caveman

Heh, same. That, and living in constant fear of a Smilodon attack.

#6

No it’s not public it was a rather sloppy PoC I threw together one rainy afternoon.
Also, I don’t think it would be correct to release it either, the devs probably have a reason for not open-sourcing this part of Volumio.
Maybe best to reach out to one of them directly…

On the topic of updates, I find it easier to build a system that uses upstream Debian packages. This lets me use apt to manage my upgrades easily. For Volumio’s core stuff, I just update manually by running a git pull. This only leaves the actual kernel and firmware, that I build deb packages and upgrade using those. Not ideal, but gets the job done…