Why White Glove?
White Glove exists for a few specific reasons:
- (1) You can boot up and get many useful maintenance, repair, and
utility functions up and running or completed and functional in 2-3
minutes
- (2) You can create and run pretty darned secure critical infrastructure
functions from any PC with a bootable CD and floppy disk, get it up in
minutes, run it for years nonstop, and restart it in 2 minutes if it
fails, power goes out, or whatever.
- (3) You can get highly reliable restartable thin client interfaces
to mainframes, midrange computers, and Unix and Windows systems that
come up fast and run well for a long time, so its useful for disaster
recovery, instant replacements for failed user interface systems, and
as a temporary interface platform wherever you go.
- (4) You can teach a class full of people with everyone doing
exactly the same thing, run a parallel processor with all of the
machines operating identically, or do experiments with precise
repetitions of experimental conditions, and it all boot and reboots in 2
minutes.
Why Not Use White Glove?
White Glove is NOT designed for certain uses. In
particular, it is NOT designed to be installed on a user workstation and
adapted over time to changing conditions, loaded with software package
after software package, updates, upgraded, and so forth.
Why is White Glove Good for These Things?
White Glove runs with a design philosophy that is
different from most other systems. The elements of the design
philosophy are as follows:
The operating environment should be very stable and reliable, to
the point where you cannot change it even if you want to. You should be
able to move the operating environment with you and keep it in your
pocket.
The configuration should be separate from the operating
environment, easily created, easily modified during testing and
implementation, and then completely stable during normal operation. You
should be able to carry a whole set of configurations in your pocket and
use the one you want where you are or leave it there as you go to the
next task.
The data should be separated from the operating environment and
configuration information and should be easily backed up, used
elsewhere, transported, put into a new hardware box, or otherwise used
as needed without having to reconfigure the system, change settings, or
otherwise spend a lot of time to get utility from it.
The operating environment, configuration, and data should be
rapidly and easily moved from hardware platform to hardware platform for
rapid utility wherever you are and whenever you need it.
These are accomplished by White Glove by putting the
operating system on a CD, the configuration on a floppy disk or other
small, mobile device, and the data on a storage device that can be
either local or mobile. All three are independent of the hardware
platform. As long as they are commodity PCs with common parts, the
operating environment, configuration, and data can be brought with you,
kept with you, and protected from others.