[sethbuzz]

Fountain codes look very interesting. There was a project at OLPC, I think written in Forth for OpenFirmware, that used something like fountain codes to reflash massive numbers of computers. It worked like this. Turn one XO-1 on in OFW mode, insert a USB with the disk image you wanted to be on all machines, and turn it on as the source server. Boot into OFW, the other XO-1s you want to reflash, and tell them to receive a new image. I think there was a key shortcut of some kind that told a machine to receive. The server XO would continue to send packets until all other machines had received enough packets to make up a complete disk image. If I remember correctly, they used it to reflash 3000 machines in the field that I heard about. There may have been more elsewhere or since.