Phone home included in NS8?

Feature
1

Is the phone home system included in NethServer 8?

For NethServer 7 it was great to see the global deployments.

2

Data are already sent to server but not shown on the map.

It requires a bit of work on the UI side. Does anyone want to try? The code is here: GitHub - NethServer/phonehome-server: Phonehome Server for NethServer 8

I know that @Tbaile took a look to it, but I do not remember how is hard to show also NethServer 8 and NethSecurity 8 installations on the map.

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3

Phonehome got a major overhaul in the backend, however the frontend would’ve took too much time to implement and has been left a bit there to rot. (we’re still analyzing the data, but with some other tools)

The UI must be rewritten completely due to some nasty calls that the backend makes for compatibility. On top of that I don’t like too much the current implementation, I’d like a more “data-oriented” approach, so that everyone can see the general hardware the machines are running on and give the community a more educated guess on what’s the general usage of both hardware and software is.

Some of the info that can be extracted:

  • How much RAM is on average on a NethServer 8 cluster with 3 nodes?
  • What’s the most used network card on NethSecurity 8?
  • Top hardware used for a NethServer 8 one node installation?

Not going to lie, if Metabase or SuperSet would do the job nicely I’ll probably swap the UI for a dashboard generated with such tools.

With all that said, if you want to contribute to such thing the code is up above and everything is build on top of Laravel, so resources for contributing are all over the place :smiley:

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4

I like the global deployment graphics. Is that ‘easier’ to impelement as a intermediate step?

Has the GDPR been incorporated in the phone home system, for I can not remember that I needed to give permission to share my server data, even anonymous? Just checking.

5

I have to rework the API that fetches the info, and it’s a big chore to adapt to the UI and it’s probably going to take a toll on the server for each query (pretending right now that cache doesn’t exists), I’d go my way out of this UI and rewrite the thing (adding insult to injury, it’s unmaintained ad the JS is quite obsolete)

EDIT: I’m not saying that the big map won’t be there :wink:

Since no data is tied to a physical person and it’s just telemetrics, no GDPR is needed for now (checked with Nick, we’re good), if down the road we face a situation where we need to fetch additional data that ties personal info, the PhoneHome service on the servers will be automatically disabled and you’ll be prompt to accept telemetrics usage.
On dev manuals is described how to see which data we send back to the PhoneHome and how to disable it:

6

Just for arguments sake, an IP address is also considered personal data…

7

The only IP that we retrieve is from the HTTP request of the server sending data. Then a GeoIP local database gives us a ISO Code of the country, if successful, the IP is threw away, otherwise no info is logged, just a log signaling that some IPs are not resolved in countries (and the request rejected)

This follows the principle of the link you sent:

Personal data that has been rendered anonymous in such a way that the individual is not or no longer identifiable is no longer considered personal data. For data to be truly anonymised, the anonymisation must be irreversible.

Sources: phonehome-server/app/Http/Controllers/InstallationController.php at master ¡ NethServer/phonehome-server ¡ GitHub

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