Re: Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
Well, creating points which go 'INTO' your server is probably not a really good strategy. However, one could do it the other way with ssh keys (i.e. no login), 'from' the server. I've thought about this before... one solution... server has a webpage which allows the XO to see and logon, and user clicks 'back me up now'. The webpage detects the IP of the XO, writes it to a special file of 'XO laptops to backup'. A server cron job, checks for this file, and grabs a IP from the list, initiates a ssh request 'into' the XO laptop using previously shared keys, 'grabs' the needed files, then closes the connection. I think that this would be safer scenario, than having a bunch of random XO's connecting 'INTO' a server. *shrug* -ixo On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Luke Gorrie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Jan 22, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: We really need the incremental backup feature. That is a core requirement that came up many times in last week's OLPC Learning Conference. I'll see about finishing it up for you, then. Please ping me from time to time to make sure this doesn't drop off my radar. Just out of curiosity: would having the XOs periodically (cron) rsync-over-ssh /home/olpc to the school server be hopelessly naive for some reason? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
I forgot to mention some 'dabbling' I did in this area too. :) Several scripts I created, some work better than others, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Ixo/Script I also started a 'rsync' reference page, for others to expand upon. . . http://wiki.laptop.org/go/rsync Have fun, and good luck, --ixo 2008/2/16 Ixo X oxI [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Well, creating points which go 'INTO' your server is probably not a really good strategy. However, one could do it the other way with ssh keys (i.e. no login), 'from' the server. I've thought about this before... one solution... server has a webpage which allows the XO to see and logon, and user clicks 'back me up now'. The webpage detects the IP of the XO, writes it to a special file of 'XO laptops to backup'. A server cron job, checks for this file, and grabs a IP from the list, initiates a ssh request 'into' the XO laptop using previously shared keys, 'grabs' the needed files, then closes the connection. I think that this would be safer scenario, than having a bunch of random XO's connecting 'INTO' a server. *shrug* -ixo On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Luke Gorrie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Jan 22, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: We really need the incremental backup feature. That is a core requirement that came up many times in last week's OLPC Learning Conference. I'll see about finishing it up for you, then. Please ping me from time to time to make sure this doesn't drop off my radar. Just out of curiosity: would having the XOs periodically (cron) rsync-over-ssh /home/olpc to the school server be hopelessly naive for some reason? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Jan 22, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: We really need the incremental backup feature. That is a core requirement that came up many times in last week's OLPC Learning Conference. I'll see about finishing it up for you, then. Please ping me from time to time to make sure this doesn't drop off my radar. Just out of curiosity: would having the XOs periodically (cron) rsync-over-ssh /home/olpc to the school server be hopelessly naive for some reason? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
Hey guys, The purpose of this e-mail is to let the wider OLPC community know what we are planning for the school server in Nepal's spring test school and to solicit your ideas on what we can do better. Sulochan Acharya and I are leading the work on the school server for the test school. If you are interested to learn who the heck we are, skip to the end of this e-mail. Sorry for the overly long e-mail but I think Sulo and I and have not been sharing enough of our ideas w/ the rest of the OLPC community. So it was time for a brain dump Our Ideas for the School Server --- 1. Backing up Student data and sharing information: We are looking to use WebDav to back up the individual student's home folder to the school server. Sulo will work this week on stripping down Moodle to bare bones for sharing materials and general content management. Right now we are considering using one acct for everyone. We don't have any existing Moodle courses in Nepali so we aren't looking to deliver courseware through Moodle. Apparently, the guys at OLPC India are using drupal for content mgt. I like Drupal but it seems to offer way more than what we are looking to do: Share files, share projects, share documents. How do we store team projects for later use? Perhaps the Journal will allow us to do this in the future but I have the impression that it is still under heavy development. Perhaps, the journal already handles this well and I am simply misinformed. Please disabuse me of any false notions. Issues: 1. Does the School Identity Manager support LDAP? LDAP support is essential for integrating existing content management systems w/ the School Server. 2. How do students share team projects for later use? For example, Laxmi and Arun are working on an essay together. Laxmi started the document and then shared it w/ Arun. Arun goes home and wants to work on the paper by himself for a while. He is connected to the mesh but Laxmi's XO doesn't appear in the mesh view. Can he still edit the document? 2. Digital Library There isn't much Nepali digital content on the Internet so part of OLE Nepal's work will be to digitize poems, literature, histories, etc. and store them somewhere. Finding the right somewhere, turned out to be more difficult than we thought. We needed a repository that could support multiple front-ends, w/ simpler front-ends for novice users and more complex front-ends for the people that will load content into the repository. This may sound like overkill to a lot of people but that is because they are accustomed to the abundance of materials in their own language on the Internet and/or access to physical libraries. There are very, very few public libraries in Nepal and Nepali-language materials on the Internet are quite limited. We don't want to have to change out the back-end repository 6 or 12 months from now if we choose something that can't scale. Scalability is one of the reasons we chose not to use Greenstone digital library http://www.greenstone.org/ We looked at Dspace and Eprints before settling on the fedora repository server www.fedora-commons.org, not to be confused w/ fedora Linux. We like fedora because it is a very powerful back-end repository that is very scalable, up to 10 million objects. It is a true web service that is decoupled from the front-end. We wouldn't be telling the full truth if we didn't admit that we chose fedora in part due to the awesome implementation of it by the Encyclopedia of Chicago http://www.fedora-commons.org/about/outreach.php#video We need to support multiple representations of a single object w/ in the repository. For example, we need to allow users to access Nepal's constitution as both a .pdf file and as an .xol bundle. We have to support non .xol bundles because we want people w/out XO's to still be able to access the library. Fedora lets us do this. The problem w/ the fedora is that the off-the-shelf user interfaces are fairly difficult to set up and maintain. Right now we are using Fez http://dev-repo.library.uq.edu.au/wiki/index.php/Main_Page It is a great front-end but was fairly time-consuming to install and customize the interface. Since the installation and maintenance of a fedora repository is fairly complex we will try to use a centralized server and smart caching on the school servers. Matt Zumwalt of MediaShelf http://www.yourmediashelf.com/ has been extremely helpful to us in working w/ fedora. I need to enlist his help to figure out how to represent .xo and .xol bundles in the fedora repository. Issues for the Digital Library: 1. We will need the School Server to aggressively support caching of requests from the library 2. The .info file format for content and activity bundles is not XML. Ivan told me recently, XML is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Perhaps he and Eric Raymond are right, but we
Re: Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
On Jan 22, 2008, at 9:59 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: We are looking to use WebDav to back up the individual student's home folder to the school server. Why on earth WebDAV? Incidentally, I had an almost-finished incremental backup according to this spec: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_backup_restore and then got pulled away to deal with some burning issues before actually finishing it. If you consider this a core requirement, I could see about getting it out the door for you. How do we store team projects for later use? Perhaps the Journal will allow us to do this in the future but I have the impression that it is still under heavy development. Perhaps, the journal already handles this well and I am simply misinformed. Please disabuse me of any false notions. The 'projects/bulletin boards' idea is core to the new datastore which is expected to land into joyride as soon as update.2 leaves the door for a cycle of testing and integration, and then become a user-facing feature in update.3, or in about half a year. 1. Does the School Identity Manager support LDAP? LDAP support is essential for integrating existing content management systems w/ the School Server. The identity manager is a hack. It needs to be rewritten. 2. How do students share team projects for later use? See my answer above re: bulletin boards. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
Awesome, great answers like this is why I sent out the e-mail. We really need the incremental backup feature. That is a core requirement that came up many times in last week's OLPC Learning Conference. But how do you archive personal files once they exceed local storage? And how would you browse that archive? We were looking at WebDav because Sulo has some experience w/ it. We aren't linux gurus. We are doing the best w/ our limited expertise to make this happen. Regarding the Journal's support for projects and bulletin boards, our pilot starts in early April so we need get something working very soon. thanks for your quick response On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 22:04 +0100, Ivan Krstić wrote: On Jan 22, 2008, at 9:59 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: We are looking to use WebDav to back up the individual student's home folder to the school server. Why on earth WebDAV? Incidentally, I had an almost-finished incremental backup according to this spec: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_backup_restore and then got pulled away to deal with some burning issues before actually finishing it. If you consider this a core requirement, I could see about getting it out the door for you. How do we store team projects for later use? Perhaps the Journal will allow us to do this in the future but I have the impression that it is still under heavy development. Perhaps, the journal already handles this well and I am simply misinformed. Please disabuse me of any false notions. The 'projects/bulletin boards' idea is core to the new datastore which is expected to land into joyride as soon as update.2 leaves the door for a cycle of testing and integration, and then become a user-facing feature in update.3, or in about half a year. 1. Does the School Identity Manager support LDAP? LDAP support is essential for integrating existing content management systems w/ the School Server. The identity manager is a hack. It needs to be rewritten. 2. How do students share team projects for later use? See my answer above re: bulletin boards. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Tentative Plans for Nepal's School Server and related infrastructure
On Jan 22, 2008, at 10:28 PM, Bryan Berry wrote: We really need the incremental backup feature. That is a core requirement that came up many times in last week's OLPC Learning Conference. I'll see about finishing it up for you, then. Please ping me from time to time to make sure this doesn't drop off my radar. But how do you archive personal files once they exceed local storage? And how would you browse that archive? This auto-archival (called 'smart dropoff') will also make its debut in the new datastore. We will not be able to provide another solution before then, so like with project and bulletin board support: if you need something for April, you'll unfortunately have to roll it yourself. Note that these are pretty hard problems and -- especially in the absence of relevant expertise -- you're likely to frustrate yourself and not make too much progress unless you're willing to very narrowly redefine the problem in terms of a tiny set of core features and then attempt to build those and no others. The new datastore should be in (pre-)alpha by April, but the Journal will not yet be able to use it. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://radian.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
