Re: [Server-devel] Is a Community Edition of XS happening? or should it?
Hello everyone, Building upon some of George's statements, we are are currently in what might be called a product development stage. This involves an analysis of the needs of our stakeholders (schools, teachers, local communities, etc.) and an evaluation of what we can do to solve these needs. We have also consulted with some key OLPC/Sugar community members in order to ascertain what is feasible in the technical realm. We feel that taking such an approach is important before we can develop a project plan and get stuck into writing code (we're writing some now, but it's not a core focus). I don't think we're far off from that. Also important is considering how this fits within the overall engineering and educational strategy of OLPC Australia (that's not to say that we're ignoring other deployments). Some things that we know already about the XS and aim to address in our project: 1. it is too monolithic 2. it can be slimmed down and made more modular 3. it can be installed as a set of packages (a repo) on top of Fedora 4. it can be installed on an XO 5. building on #3 and #4, it can be installed as packages on an XO's OS 6. we can make it easy for a novice to install server components to an existing instance of Fedora or OLPC OS 7. we can automate much of the complication and make it easy to configure 8. building on #6 and #7, it should be totally installable and manageable by a non-technical person (e.g. a teacher) 9. by installing on an XO, we can leverage some of the features (and features we'd like to add) of Sugar too If you'd like to participate, we're happy to have you. Our tracker and code repo are open. More to come... Sridhar Sridhar Dhanapalan Engineering Manager One Laptop per Child Australia On 30 July 2012 03:27, George Hunt georgejh...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, I just got the included message from Adam Holt, after his on the ground experiences installing a school server in Madagascar, and apparently struggling to get ejabberd working. It points up a situation which I think we should think about. A lot of people I've talked to, think the School Server status quo is not good enough. It is not meeting the needs of schools, teachers, and students. Many are beginning to go their own way. The centrifugal force is building: OLPC Australia is looking to simplify the XS, to include just ejabberd for collaboration and have it run on the XO-1.75. Eliminate dhcp in favor of avahi, eliminate Moodle, Squid, Named. Sridhar Dhanapalan wants to get to the point where the individual teacher in the classroom can set it up. Jerry Vonau has been hired to muscle up support for the upcoming deployment of 50,000 XO's with one XS in each classroom. In the Philippines, through bad advice, the local technicians started trying to use the Australia version of the XS. They didn't have the local sysadmin skills to add back in named and dhcpd, which had been removed for Australian deployment. They're looking for a better solution. Adam Holt has been soliciting ideas from the support gang for finding a XS solution that just works. Jamaca is making Moodle central to its deployment strategy, but it needs some predictability in terms of school server depoyment. Tony Anderson and Abhishek Singh,in the Nepal deployment, have their own XS image tailored to their own needs. But I also think that the support that Boston has given to the XS has been essential. Daniel Drake's XS-0.7 brought together many of the improvements that have accumulated over the last few years. Maybe we're at the point where Red Hat was, when it split the Enterprise Linux from Fedora Core. EL would have a slower release cycle, and pick up the features that had been well tested via the six month Fedora release cycle. Sridhar seems to have the energy, resources, and management skills to make the stripped down XO-XS happen. Tony Anderson, Sameer Verma, Abhishek Singh have all expressed to me their willingness to contribute to some joint effort. From my point of view, the challenge is to keep it simple, and to start working towards a structure where all of us can take a small piece, work on it, and contribute it back to the common effort. George -- Forwarded message -- From: Adam Holt h...@laptop.org Date: Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 8:03 AM Subject: fix at last? changing XS hostname dilemmas To: Mitchell Seaton meaton...@gmail.com, Craig A. Perue craig.pe...@gmail.com, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu, George Hunt georgejh...@gmail.com, Xavier Carcelle xavier.carce...@gmail.com Cc: Alex Kleider aklei...@sonic.net, Jerry Vonau jvo...@shaw.ca Skype excerpt :) [7:39:35 AM] Jerry Vonau: Sorry I haven't gotten back to you earlier, think I know what the issue is with ejabberd if you change the hostname. [7:40:01 AM] Canoe Berry: Really?? [7:40:49 AM] Jerry Vonau: ejabberd creates a pem.cert based on the hostname when first installed, change the hostname and it
Re: [Server-devel] Is a Community Edition of XS happening? or should it?
I'm also pleased to see how much XS 0.7 has borrowed from our XS-AU builds. It's great validation of our work thus far and encouragement for us to take things further. It's clear that XS development has not been able to receive enough resources to maintain ongoing development at the pace that is needed. I think that improvements can be made at a faster rate, and the user adoption rate increased, if the XS is a set of packages on top of Fedora (and, by extension, the OLPC OS). Sridhar On 2 August 2012 22:58, Sridhar Dhanapalan srid...@laptop.org.au wrote: Hello everyone, Building upon some of George's statements, we are are currently in what might be called a product development stage. This involves an analysis of the needs of our stakeholders (schools, teachers, local communities, etc.) and an evaluation of what we can do to solve these needs. We have also consulted with some key OLPC/Sugar community members in order to ascertain what is feasible in the technical realm. We feel that taking such an approach is important before we can develop a project plan and get stuck into writing code (we're writing some now, but it's not a core focus). I don't think we're far off from that. Also important is considering how this fits within the overall engineering and educational strategy of OLPC Australia (that's not to say that we're ignoring other deployments). Some things that we know already about the XS and aim to address in our project: 1. it is too monolithic 2. it can be slimmed down and made more modular 3. it can be installed as a set of packages (a repo) on top of Fedora 4. it can be installed on an XO 5. building on #3 and #4, it can be installed as packages on an XO's OS 6. we can make it easy for a novice to install server components to an existing instance of Fedora or OLPC OS 7. we can automate much of the complication and make it easy to configure 8. building on #6 and #7, it should be totally installable and manageable by a non-technical person (e.g. a teacher) 9. by installing on an XO, we can leverage some of the features (and features we'd like to add) of Sugar too If you'd like to participate, we're happy to have you. Our tracker and code repo are open. More to come... Sridhar Sridhar Dhanapalan Engineering Manager One Laptop per Child Australia On 30 July 2012 03:27, George Hunt georgejh...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, I just got the included message from Adam Holt, after his on the ground experiences installing a school server in Madagascar, and apparently struggling to get ejabberd working. It points up a situation which I think we should think about. A lot of people I've talked to, think the School Server status quo is not good enough. It is not meeting the needs of schools, teachers, and students. Many are beginning to go their own way. The centrifugal force is building: OLPC Australia is looking to simplify the XS, to include just ejabberd for collaboration and have it run on the XO-1.75. Eliminate dhcp in favor of avahi, eliminate Moodle, Squid, Named. Sridhar Dhanapalan wants to get to the point where the individual teacher in the classroom can set it up. Jerry Vonau has been hired to muscle up support for the upcoming deployment of 50,000 XO's with one XS in each classroom. In the Philippines, through bad advice, the local technicians started trying to use the Australia version of the XS. They didn't have the local sysadmin skills to add back in named and dhcpd, which had been removed for Australian deployment. They're looking for a better solution. Adam Holt has been soliciting ideas from the support gang for finding a XS solution that just works. Jamaca is making Moodle central to its deployment strategy, but it needs some predictability in terms of school server depoyment. Tony Anderson and Abhishek Singh,in the Nepal deployment, have their own XS image tailored to their own needs. But I also think that the support that Boston has given to the XS has been essential. Daniel Drake's XS-0.7 brought together many of the improvements that have accumulated over the last few years. Maybe we're at the point where Red Hat was, when it split the Enterprise Linux from Fedora Core. EL would have a slower release cycle, and pick up the features that had been well tested via the six month Fedora release cycle. Sridhar seems to have the energy, resources, and management skills to make the stripped down XO-XS happen. Tony Anderson, Sameer Verma, Abhishek Singh have all expressed to me their willingness to contribute to some joint effort. From my point of view, the challenge is to keep it simple, and to start working towards a structure where all of us can take a small piece, work on it, and contribute it back to the common effort. George -- Forwarded message -- From: Adam Holt h...@laptop.org Date: Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 8:03 AM Subject: fix at last? changing XS
[Server-devel] Is a Community Edition of XS happening? or should it?
Hi all, I just got the included message from Adam Holt, after his on the ground experiences installing a school server in Madagascar, and apparently struggling to get ejabberd working. It points up a situation which I think we should think about. A lot of people I've talked to, think the School Server status quo is not good enough. It is not meeting the needs of schools, teachers, and students. Many are beginning to go their own way. The centrifugal force is building: - OLPC Australia is looking to simplify the XS, to include just ejabberd for collaboration and have it run on the XO-1.75. Eliminate dhcp in favor of avahi, eliminate Moodle, Squid, Named. Sridhar Dhanapalan wants to get to the point where the individual teacher in the classroom can set it up. Jerry Vonau has been hired to muscle up support for the upcoming deployment of 50,000 XO's with one XS in each classroom. - In the Philippines, through bad advice, the local technicians started trying to use the Australia version of the XS. They didn't have the local sysadmin skills to add back in named and dhcpd, which had been removed for Australian deployment. They're looking for a better solution. - Adam Holt has been soliciting ideas from the support gang for finding a XS solution that just works. - Jamaca is making Moodle central to its deployment strategy, but it needs some predictability in terms of school server depoyment. - Tony Anderson and Abhishek Singh,in the Nepal deployment, have their own XS image tailored to their own needs. But I also think that the support that Boston has given to the XS has been essential. Daniel Drake's XS-0.7 brought together many of the improvements that have accumulated over the last few years. Maybe we're at the point where Red Hat was, when it split the Enterprise Linux from Fedora Core. EL would have a slower release cycle, and pick up the features that had been well tested via the six month Fedora release cycle. Sridhar seems to have the energy, resources, and management skills to make the stripped down XO-XS happen. Tony Anderson, Sameer Verma, Abhishek Singh have all expressed to me their willingness to contribute to some joint effort. From my point of view, the challenge is to keep it simple, and to start working towards a structure where all of us can take a small piece, work on it, and contribute it back to the common effort. George -- Forwarded message -- From: Adam Holt h...@laptop.org Date: Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 8:03 AM Subject: fix at last? changing XS hostname dilemmas To: Mitchell Seaton meaton...@gmail.com, Craig A. Perue craig.pe...@gmail.com, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu, George Hunt georgejh...@gmail.com, Xavier Carcelle xavier.carce...@gmail.com Cc: Alex Kleider aklei...@sonic.net, Jerry Vonau jvo...@shaw.ca Skype excerpt :) [7:39:35 AM] Jerry Vonau: Sorry I haven't gotten back to you earlier, think I know what the issue is with ejabberd if you change the hostname. [7:40:01 AM] Canoe Berry: Really?? [7:40:49 AM] Jerry Vonau: ejabberd creates a pem.cert based on the hostname when first installed, change the hostname and it becomes invalid [7:42:54 AM] Jerry Vonau: quick fix is to delete /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.pem and re-install ejabberd. [7:43:40 AM] Jerry Vonau: or create your own cert and alter the config file to use the new one instead. [7:45:40 AM] Jerry Vonau: by the way I have ejabberd running on XO-1.75. [7:48:54 AM] Canoe Berry: Sweet, can I forward to Craig/Sameer for Jamaica? [7:49:15 AM] Jerry Vonau: as for the dns issue, think the model used is flawed, you need full control over the dns, think we should be using avahi on the XS and XO and use .local for the domain. [7:49:37 AM] Jerry Vonau: have that working too [7:50:02 AM] Canoe Berry: Are you suggesting Madagascar/Nosy Komba/OLPC France's use of dsnmasq is doomed, as Mitch Seaton suspected? [7:51:47 AM] Jerry Vonau: sort of, with the push to ip6 the clients use ipv6 first to resolve the names and that is where the delay is introduced. [7:52:11 AM | Edited 7:52:56 AM] Jerry Vonau: when registering If someone can clean this up and post to server-devel@l.o that's be awesome! ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Is a Community Edition of XS happening? or should it?
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 10:27 AM, George Hunt georgejh...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, I just got the included message from Adam Holt, after his on the ground experiences installing a school server in Madagascar, and apparently struggling to get ejabberd working. It points up a situation which I think we should think about. A lot of people I've talked to, think the School Server status quo is not good enough. It is not meeting the needs of schools, teachers, and students. Many are beginning to go their own way. The centrifugal force is building: OLPC Australia is looking to simplify the XS, to include just ejabberd for collaboration and have it run on the XO-1.75. Eliminate dhcp in favor of avahi, eliminate Moodle, Squid, Named. Sridhar Dhanapalan wants to get to the point where the individual teacher in the classroom can set it up. Jerry Vonau has been hired to muscle up support for the upcoming deployment of 50,000 XO's with one XS in each classroom. In the Philippines, through bad advice, the local technicians started trying to use the Australia version of the XS. They didn't have the local sysadmin skills to add back in named and dhcpd, which had been removed for Australian deployment. They're looking for a better solution. Part of the problem here is that such decisions happen in a bubble, over a Skype call or private e-mail. We had some conversations with Cherry Withers about XS 0.6 back then, but then the e-mails never came through the list. Even though the needs for all these deployments are different (and may not be serviceable via one image) the conversations need to happen on this list as much as possible. Adam Holt has been soliciting ideas from the support gang for finding a XS solution that just works. Jamaca is making Moodle central to its deployment strategy, but it needs some predictability in terms of school server depoyment. For Jamaica, we are definitely leaning towards Moodle because of the experience we have in house for Moodle. However, for a deployment that does not have that expertise, Moodle may not be desireable. It should be yet another check box on a list of things to install or remove. Most deployments that say they use Moodle actually only use the XS admin side of things that are now built into the XS version of Moodle. Most deployments have no clue how Moodle works, let alone take advantage of its capabilities. Tony Anderson and Abhishek Singh,in the Nepal deployment, have their own XS image tailored to their own needs. Again, own needs are ok, because those are central for a deployment, but without a loop in this forum, that's all unknown to the rest of us. But I also think that the support that Boston has given to the XS has been essential. Daniel Drake's XS-0.7 brought together many of the improvements that have accumulated over the last few years. Maybe we're at the point where Red Hat was, when it split the Enterprise Linux from Fedora Core. EL would have a slower release cycle, and pick up the features that had been well tested via the six month Fedora release cycle. Sridhar seems to have the energy, resources, and management skills to make the stripped down XO-XS happen. Tony Anderson, Sameer Verma, Abhishek Singh have all expressed to me their willingness to contribute to some joint effort. We can definitely contribute in: 1) load testing any new builds and 2) provide feedback from the field by actually using the XS and collecting data. From my point of view, the challenge is to keep it simple, and to start working towards a structure where all of us can take a small piece, work on it, and contribute it back to the common effort. I see it as a spectrum, where there is the XS design with all components prepackaged and ready to go, but the downside is that you have to use it as is with all the pieces. That's one end of the spectrum. On the other end, if you want to use a server per classroom, like what AU wants to do, or you have a deployment where curricular model does not make sense (my India project - http://bhagmalpur.wordpress.com/ - lives outside of the classroom/teacher structure) one needs to be able to pick services from a menu - Moodle, Pathagar, ejabberd, dhcpd, dns, etc and prune the XS stack accordingly. Keep in mind that the current XS design is based on what OLPC needs (and needed) in the field with its deployments. The design may or may not address specific needs of other deployments. As for running the XS on a 1.5 or 1.75 the hardware makes sense, if the size of the bubble is small enough. After all, the XO has a screen, a keyboard, built-in battery, and power charge controller! Piggyback a USB drive for storage, and you have a compact platform for running services. Heck, most deployments have a couple of XOs all beat up and cracked - perfect server candidates :-) How small/large a bubble? We can help run the numbers and let you know once we have a box up and running. Whether the XS should be a
