Quartermaster is a system coordinates sharing of USB devices.
It has a plugable interface that supports multiple USB sharing technologies, currently VirtualHere and usbip are supported.
Additionally it integrates with CI systems to supply hardware to jobs stuck in queue. Support is in place for TeamCity but supporting other CI systems should be fairly simple.
Usually with USB devices the device has to physically attached to computer. For devices that are rare, expensive, or are needed many places this can be frustrating. In my case I found I was having to set up many special servers with attached hardware to support certain workloads. Each server had a cost associated with it and lead to significant under-use of resources and/or long delays in scheduling workloads.
Although attempts have been made to secure Quartermaster at present there are a number of significant shortcomings. At this point the security mostly prevents abuse by benign neglect such as a user forgetting to release a device after they are done using it.
- No protection of any sort of USB device device communications
- Limited controls to prevent device usage when not reserved
- No prevent of user from stealing and disconnecting each others devices
As a result Quartermaster should only be run and users in trusted networks or access should be controlled using networking.
A Pool is a collection of "like" resources. Users should be able to
request a resource a from a pool and find any resource in the pool to
be sufficient for their needs.
A Resource is a collection of USB devices logically grouped together.
In most case a resource will only have one device but in special workloads,
for example a device under test and hardware doing the testing, multiple
devices are supported.
A Device is the representation of a single USB devices in a single port.
The server which is a central point of control. It maintains a inventory of resources and their status
There are two basic methods of making use of a resource presented by Quartermaster
An RemoteHost hosts USB devices devices that Quartermaster is configured to provision
A client which attached a remote USB device to use it
- Using the web service. Using the GUI users can log-in and reserve a resource for their use. They will get a special url for the resource they reserved and by using the qua
git clone git@github.com:usb-quartermaster/USB_Quartermaster_server.git
cd quartermaster
deploy/build_docker_images.sh
# Add you own certs or use the command below to generate self signed test certs
# openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -days 365 -nodes -x509 -keyout tls.key -out tls_chain.crt -subj "/C=CA/ST=ON/L=Kitchener/O=Ops/CN=quartermaster.example.com"
# If you forgot to generate your certificates before starting services delete the tls.key and tls_chain.crt directories Docker created and run `docker-compose rm frontend` to recover
docker-compose up -d
# To set up an administrator account
docker-compose exec backend ./manage.py createsuperuser