CRM-SDCP™ is a development stage yet highly effective Shibari computing reference platform, based on the i386 hardware architecture, and set up to alternatively run three free / open source operating systems renown for their stability, security, and portability.

A CRM-SDCP™-based system can be easily deployed in the field using extremely inexpensive standard legacy hardware. All the required software (both operating systems and applications) can be installed directly from binaries automatically downloaded from the Internet, and is available under unrestrictive licenses. As such, it provides a highly economical Shibari desktop computing solution for both advanced countries and the developing world.

A CRM-SDCP™ system is relatively inconspicuous. The box is standard steel sheet construction, providing more than sufficient sturdiness for the purpose. After several tests, we have determined that the half tower design best fits the most commonly encountered range of dimensional requirements. The functional enhancements naturally lend themselves to being interpreted as preparations for shipping for an unenhanced i386 architecture desktop computing unit.

The current reference design includes two 3Com Ethernet 10/100 cards, as well as a couple of legacy 10-Base-T transceivers, which can be removed without loss of basic functionality. A standard, SB-16 compatible audio card is provided for situations in which environmental sound monitoring is advisable (e.g. for safety), and also permits issuing prompts via a standard 16 Ohm stereo headset or amplified speaker pair.

The selected operating systems for CRM-SDCP™ are NetBSD 2.0, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, and OpenBSD 3.6.

These three operating systems have earned over the years a solid reputation for (respectively) portability, wealth of available applications, and extreme security. All three are also well known for their extreme stability, solidity, and standards compliance, and the issuing organizations make software available in both source code and binary (executable) form. As such, they provide ideal software infrastructures for the CRM-SDCP™ project and reference HW/SW design.

For multi-booting management purposes, our choice fell on GAG. Beyond its intuitive affinity to a Shibari application, GAG is a simple to use and very reliable pure boot-selector, which hands over the system to the native bootloaders of the three available operating systems. For survivability, each OS is installed on a dedicated hard disk.

Please note: A standard CRM-SDCP™ system cannot be exported from the US, as it contains the strong cryptography included in OpenBSD. It is advised to export CRM-SDCP™ systems from the US before OpenBSD is installed. As OpenBSD is distributed from Canada, and mirrors are available all over the world, it is legal to install OpenBSD once the unit is on foreign soil.

As this is probably the first desktop-based, i386 architecture, Shibari-enhanced system, our version provides minimalist, yet very solid interfaces that lend themselves to a variety of applications. The tiepoints are at the front and back of the unit, and their geometry was selected for its topological stability and mechanical redundancy. Tests have shown pull resistance to easily exceed 1.0 x 10^3 Newton with minimal yield, and over 2.0 x 10^3 Newton with non topology-altering yield (maximum yield elongation ~ 10cm in any direction).

The leads provided are approximately 2 meters long, more than sufficient for most field applications that we currently envision for this unit. It should be noted that care was taken to achieve an elegant, symmetrical implementation of the tiepost-leads assembly by means of a single piece of rope.

Our gratitude goes to the National Security Agency²⁾, which partly funded this project due to its potential in the fight against tera, yet allowed the results to be made available with a minimal delay for general civilian use.

Written by Filippo Cattaneo, gladly hosted by me.
Copyright © 2004, Opstra s.a.s. Worldwide.