Re: [Server-devel] Looking for new low power server hardware candidate
On 04/11/2012 04:52 PM, James Cameron wrote: G'day George, The trouble with a full mechanical engineering treatment of this is that there's no telling what size each of the parts will be. For something similar I used a kitchen vegetable rack. This is a plastic shelf, with feet, with a square grid pattern. It is often used for potatos and onions in food storage here, since these two vegetables are best stored without light. The grid pattern allows equipment to be anchored using cable ties. It also has good airflow. Equipment can be anchored above and below the floor of the rack. Cables can be threaded through widened holes. You may be able to simplify your design a bit: 1. move from a USB HDD to a fast high spec SD card, saves one port, enough saving to avoid the USB hub and DC/DC inverter, 2. locate a USB hub that takes a 12V input, 3. decide on only one Ethernet interface. A minor thing; I would not have the input USB cable beyond the baseboard. It may be hit. We have been using MSI Windbox DE-220 at Nepal and it is performing good at deployment sites. -- Abhishek Singh System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal साझा शिक्षा ई-पाटी http://www.olenepal.org Tel: +977-1-551 ext. 102 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] CentOS hardware support doubts
On 02/01/2012 01:15 AM, Daniel Drake wrote: Hi, Like others, I'm interested in moving the XS to a newer OS base. My key motivation for this is that the Foundation Zamora Teran (OLPC Nicaragua) is having difficulty buying servers for new schools being added to the project - Fedora 9 is too old to support this hardware. For the next XS release, Martin suggests that CentOS 6.2 (or another RHEL equivalent) is used as a base. As my contribution here will likely be limited to just this rebase, I'm prepared to accept that preference. However, having installed/run CentOS 6.2 for the first time I now have my doubts about this. I installed it on a server where the network interface does not appear with F9 (but does work with more recent Fedora). With CentOS, the same problem as F9 is presented: no network adapter. Digging further, I see that support was added to the Linux kernel for this particular network adapter (Atheros AR8152) on February 16th, 2010. However, since CentOS 6.2 uses a kernel from 2009, it does not support this hardware. This seems excessively old for a distro that was released in December 2011, and I imagine that we will see many such problems if we run with this. With this in mind, is there still a strong preference to go with CentOS, or would a more recent Fedora (e.g. 16/17?) be a better choice? Thanks, Daniel ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel Hi Daniel, Moving to CentOS or some enterprise Linux makes sense for rebasing XS on but given the limitations with hardware compatibility, this might be a blocker. New hardware are being used at deployments so probably we might have to stick with newer versions of Fedora. -- Abhishek Singh System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal साझा शिक्षा ई-पाटी http://www.olenepal.org Tel: +977-1-551 ext. 102 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Regarding my OLPC XS Wishlist
On 06/05/2011 09:42 PM, Tony Anderson wrote: Hi, I hope we can keep Abhisek in the loop as he has detailed information on the XS version deployed in Nepal. The procedure there is to build XS and release it as an img. The image is loaded to a usb drive (mkusbinstall.sh). This key is used to install all of the deployed school servers. I have attached the instructions for installing NEXS from the olenepal redmine (slightly edited). I am very internet-challenged (at this campground I arrived on Thursday and used the internet for about two hours and then it died - now on Sunday evening it is working intermittently!), so I think some of my previous comments have not been received. So please be patient if you have read this before: I think the separation of the server into two components XS and XC is very valuable. The XC build should provide a working schoolserver which can be accessed via the LAN from an XO using ssh. With the XS-Au fix for the 'race' condition in kickstart, it should be possible to do this install 'headless' on a server which supports booting from the usb drive when present (and bootable). XC provides the content for the /library partition. However, with Daniel Drake's usbmount scripts XC could be used to install any optional packages such as Dan's Guardian, Moodle (forgive me, Martin), Fedora Commons, Fez, mediawiki, and so on. The netsetup.sh script should be used to configure the WAN network and should not be needed when the school server is not connected to an external network (the LAN network is configured the same in every school as 172.18.0.1). The LAN should be configured for the baseboard (RJ45) port and the WAN for a secondary port (e.g. usb-ethernet). Essentially this is the procedure used in Nepal with considerable success over the past two years (success measured by the schoolserver very rarely being a problem requiring service (UPS failures seem far more frequent). Tony P.S. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLE_Nepal:Procedure_to_build_NEXS_from_OLPC_XS gives a description of the build procedure used for XS-0.4. It provides details on the installation of the extra packages as of that time. Abhishek Singh can provide more recent details. On 06/03/2011 04:21 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: On 4 June 2011 00:00, Aleksey Limalsr...@activitycentral.org wrote: On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 09:40:48AM -0400, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 7:49 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan srid...@laptop.org.au wrote: On 3 June 2011 21:31, Aleksey Limalsr...@activitycentral.org wrote: btw, did someone try to use cloning paradigm for setting up new school servers instead of using regular install way? Just clonning the system will lest avoid many issues by design. Do you mean creating an image of a server installation and applying it to other machines? We've done that with the XS-AU (using clonezilla), and I'm pretty sure it works with an OLPC XS. Note that without a script that cleans up config state, you're bound to have some fun problems with the resulting systems. Do you mean particular script, which one? You'll need to clean up: /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (delete the lines that refer to all the eth devices) /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* (remove the HWADDR line) ssh keys (/etc/ssh/ssh_host_*) postgresql server.crt Info: http://dev.laptop.org.au/issues/422 Sridhar Hi Tony, and all, Greetings from Nepal. I would like to correct a few things in Tony's descriptions and elaborate upon what he discussed. NEXS (the Nepalese version built upon OLPC XS) has separated the content part from the base server. We call the content part NEXC (C for content). This separation has helped us a lot in managing content bundles and content updates. The NEXC generally contains: 1. Content of the digital library (see http://www.pustakalaya.org), which is spanned across: * Database dumps for Fedora Commons and Fez * Fedora Commons datastream files * Fez's customized interface (that is being used at pustakalaya.org) 2. Wiki for schools 3. English Wiktionary 4. Nepali Dictionary 5. External Content: All the other static content (e.g. video files, maps etc) are packaged as external content 6. Learn English Kids from British Council (recently added) We have a 3-month NEXC release schedule. At every release, we'll bundle the most recent content and put it on a USB HDD, test it internally on our test school server, and then finally release it. After every release, the deployment team will go to the schools with the USB HDDs and plug it to the school server at the site schools. Daniel Drake's usbmount script takes care of installing/updating the content from the USB HDDs - you just nee to listen to the starting and the ending beep during which all the content update is done. We have tried updating it over Internet
Re: [Server-devel] XS wishlist
to have this feature included with the XS Socializing/Communication Platform I have always been looking forward to implementing a socializing and communication platform on the XS that will help users to socialize and communicate. By this I mean inter-school and intra-school communication. Also that this framework can be used to send messages and notifications to users (teachers, administrators, and students). Implementing an offline mail queue which keeps mail lined up and sends them when it has internet connectivity would be a great features. Schools in Nepal have sparse Internet connectivity, and such a mail queue might help inter-school communication. I’m looking forward to use Open Atrium as a tool for this purpose. Also a multi-node system of Open Atrium, if it can be implemented, with a inter-node communication, would ease the task a lot. These were some of the customizations I envision would help a great deal with the XS. I’m not even sure if items off my wishlist are feasible at this time. What is your XS wishlist? ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel Thanks Sameer for posting, I was just about to post this to the mailing list. This wishlist contains some of the items that we are already doing at OLE Nepal, and some which we would like to have integrated into OLPC XS. I hope the recommended changes would benefit the whole community. -- Abhishek Singh System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal साझा शिक्षा ई-पाटी http://www.olenepal.org Tel: +977-1-551 ext. 301 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Plans for a new xs release?
On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 11:29 PM, Bernie Innocenti ber...@codewiz.orgwrote: Martin, I was wondering if there are any plans to rebase the schoolserver onto a more recent version of Fedora. We seem to have stability and performance issues with ejabberd bundled with the XS 0.5. Probably also on 0.6, since it's also based on Fedora 9. I've also been running ejabberd on Karmic for a while. Stability has been good for me, but it remains an arcane and hard to manage piece of software. Robert McQueen today proposed switching from ejabberd to Prosody, which supposedly has a more active and helpful upstream. For more info, see http://prosody.im/ . Thoughts? -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Server-devel mailing list server-de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devehttp://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel I was also wondering if there would be new releases. Heard that the new XS is going to be based on CentOS. We're still using the F9 based version. Regards,* Abhishek Singh* System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal ___ Server-devel mailing list server-de...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Regarding Moodle Auto-Registration
On 05/24/2010 11:50 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 12:29 AM, Abhishek Singh abhishek.si...@olenepal.org wrote: Thank you for your mail. Is there a git repo so that I could look over the code? We are trying to use moodle for classroom management (for teachers), and gradually use it for grading (gradebook improvements), and at the next phase as a complete VLE. Your suggestions are welcome. http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/martin/ http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/martin/moodle.git/log/?h=mdl19-xs06 m Thanks for the information Martin. I'll look into it. -- Abhishek Singh System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal साझा शिक्षा ई-पाटी http://www.olenepal.org Tel: +977-1-551 ext. 301 ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] Regarding Moodle Auto-Registration
Dear All, Hello. I'm new to this list. I was looking for the code that autoregisters XOs to Moodle when they connect to the schoolserver. Is it insided the idmgr? I could not find the moodle stuff inside idmgr though. Any help would be appreciable. Thank You. -- Abhishek Singh System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal साझा शिक्षा ई-पाटी http://www.olenepal.org Tel: +977-1-551 ext. 301 ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
