[Server-devel] XS on XO Setup as Contingency for Main Power Outage
Sorry this is so long, but I thought I'd post this in case someone else
needed something similar. Also, any suggestions to make this more efficient
are more than welcome.
How I set up an emergency use XS on an XO-1
Since I run a public XS on a big old Dell in my house, I needed a solid
contingency plan should the power go out. While I have my XS on a UPS, it's
small and cheap and only keeps it up about half an hour. I do have a power
inverter that we hook up to a car battery, which keeps the DSL modem, and
thus our internet, up for many hours so we can use our netbooks. Charging
an XO shouldn't add that much more drain. So to keep my users happy and
chatting while I surf the web in the dark, I set up the XS on an XO-1. This
will also be useful in the summer should my A/C unit go out when it's 100
degrees and I don't want my regular equipment to overheat.
I followed the instructions here to set up an 8 GB SD card:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS-on-XO
It takes forever for the first boot, of course, while moodle initializes.
Log in as root, and set the root password. Add a user for ssh. It doesn't
have to be olpc.
adduser olpc
passwd olpc
Plug in a USB ethernet adapter. The one I got at OLPC-SF works very well.
Run updates.
yum -y update
When that finishes, reboot.
I know you're supposed to do this right away after first boot and login, but
that gave me problems for some reason. Anyway, now after I have the first
boot and updates over with, I set the domain. Since I'm using the XSXO as a
backup for the XS, I set the domain to the XS's.
/etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/domain_config example.org
Enable password authentication in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /etc/ssh/
sshd_config.in You should be able to edit only sshd_config and then run
make -f /etc/xs-config.make sshd_config to do up sshd_config.in properly,
but never cooperates for me so I simply edit both files.
# To disable tunneled clear text passwords, change to no here!
PasswordAuthentication yes
#PermitEmptyPasswords no
#PasswordAuthentication no
Go ahead and reboot. ssh in with your user and password.
* Apache setup *
Since this is an emergency XSXO, I'm not going to run Moodle. I also need
a simple index page to let my users know what's going on.
Change the listen directives in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd-xs.conf to just this:
Listen 80
Stop Moodle from being the default homepage
mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/010-make-moodle-default.conf
/etc/httpd/conf.d/010-make-moodle-default.conf.bak
Set up an informative page in /var/www/html as index.html
html
headtitleEmergency XSXO/title/head
body
br
If you can see this, I'm running the XS on an XO/br
br
It might be a power outage or I might be doing maintenance on the big
XS/br
br
If you already have an ejabberd account on the usual XS, it's been migrated
over./br
br
FONT COLOR=redIf you're just getting here and don't have an account,
here's the server info:/br
b/br
bServer: schoolserver.example.org/b/br
bPort: 5223/b/FONT
br
a href=../cgi-bin/sysinfo.shh3Monitor System Stats/h3/a
br
/body
/html
A cgi script is nice to see some XSXO system information, particularly how
the battery is doing. Put this in /var/www/cgi-bin as sysinfo.sh and chmod
a+x sysinfo.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo Content-type: text/html
echo
echo htmlheadtitleXSXO System Information
echo /title/headbody
echo h1General system information for XSXO on $(hostname)/h1
echo
echo h1 Battery Status/h1
echo pre $(cat /sys/class/power_supply/olpc-battery/capacity)% $(cat
/sys/class/power_supply/olpc-battery/status)/pre
echo h1Memory Info/h1
echo pre $(free -m) /pre
echo h1Disk Info:/h1
echo pre $(df -h) /pre
echo br/br
echo h2Information generated on $(date)/h2
echo /body/html
echo br
echo a href=../index.htmlh3Home Pageh3/a
Since the XSXO will be exposed to the internet, I create robots.txt in
/var/www/html to try and keep the spiders away.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Restart httpd and test the changes.
**
* Ejabberd Setup *
**
Sometimes my users use XOs, but most of the time they like other clients,
like finch, pidgin, adium, etc. It's useful to be able to reset passwords
or delete accounts via the web interface. It's also useful for the admin
user to be able to create a persistent chat room. To do that, I login as
the admin user with psi, create a room named chat and then configure it to
be persistent.
As I did with ssh, I go ahead and edit both /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd-xs.cfg
and /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd-xs.cfg.in as I've never quite gotten 'make -f
/etc/xs-config.make' to behave.
To allow admin login, uncomment this line.
{acl, admin, {user, admin, schoolserver.example.org}}.
To allow web access, uncomment these lines.
{5280, ejabberd_http, [
inet6,
http_poll,
web_admin
]}
To allow the admin user to configure persistent chat rooms, add _admin to
the the lines below like so.
{mod_muc,
Re: [Server-devel] XS on XO Setup as Contingency for Main Power Outage
On Dec 15, 2010, at 7:09 PM, Anna wrote: Sorry this is so long, but I thought I'd post this in case someone else needed something similar. Also, any suggestions to make this more efficient are more than welcome. How I set up an emergency use XS on an XO-1 Since I run a public XS on a big old Dell in my house, I needed a solid contingency plan should the power go out. While I have my XS on a UPS, it's small and cheap and only keeps it up about half an hour. I do have a power inverter that we hook up to a car battery, which keeps the DSL modem, and thus our internet, up for many hours so we can use our netbooks. Charging an XO shouldn't add that much more drain. So to keep my users happy and chatting while I surf the web in the dark, I set up the XS on an XO-1. This will also be useful in the summer should my A/C unit go out when it's 100 degrees and I don't want my regular equipment to overheat. I followed the instructions here to set up an 8 GB SD card: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS-on-XO It takes forever for the first boot, of course, while moodle initializes. I would recommend that you use a class 6 or class 10 full size SD card for this purpose. One of the Sandisk Extreme III cards, for example. The extra cost is worth it for the server. There is a huge difference in card performance, especially for small file writes, and the new larger sized (8+GB) microSD cards tend to be especially bad. Great write-up, by the way. Thanks! wad ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS on XO Setup as Contingency for Main Power Outage
On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 8:11 PM, John Watlington w...@laptop.org wrote: On Dec 15, 2010, at 7:09 PM, Anna wrote: Sorry this is so long, but I thought I'd post this in case someone else needed something similar. Also, any suggestions to make this more efficient are more than welcome. How I set up an emergency use XS on an XO-1 Since I run a public XS on a big old Dell in my house, I needed a solid contingency plan should the power go out. While I have my XS on a UPS, it's small and cheap and only keeps it up about half an hour. I do have a power inverter that we hook up to a car battery, which keeps the DSL modem, and thus our internet, up for many hours so we can use our netbooks. Charging an XO shouldn't add that much more drain. So to keep my users happy and chatting while I surf the web in the dark, I set up the XS on an XO-1. This will also be useful in the summer should my A/C unit go out when it's 100 degrees and I don't want my regular equipment to overheat. I followed the instructions here to set up an 8 GB SD card: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS-on-XO It takes forever for the first boot, of course, while moodle initializes. I would recommend that you use a class 6 or class 10 full size SD card for this purpose. One of the Sandisk Extreme III cards, for example. The extra cost is worth it for the server. There is a huge difference in card performance, especially for small file writes, and the new larger sized (8+GB) microSD cards tend to be especially bad. Great write-up, by the way. Agreed. This should be put on the wiki somewhere. -walter Thanks! wad ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS on XO Setup as Contingency for Main Power Outage
On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 7:11 PM, John Watlington w...@laptop.org wrote: I would recommend that you use a class 6 or class 10 full size SD card for this purpose. One of the Sandisk Extreme III cards, for example. The extra cost is worth it for the server. There is a huge difference in card performance, especially for small file writes, and the new larger sized (8+GB) microSD cards tend to be especially bad. It's an 8 GB Patriot SDHC class 6, which has always been really snappy. I actually used an initial iteration of the XSXO for a couple of weeks last month for an extended maintenance window while I diddled around backing up, cleaning out the dust bunnies, and reinstalling my regular XS. My users couldn't tell the difference as far as Jabber went. I did have to make sure to not keep a local login up, as I had the XSXO on the floor in the pantry next to the DSL modem and the cats would walk on the XO's keyboard. Darn it, cat, you're not root! Great write-up, by the way. Thanks! wad Thanks! I've been meaning to get this set up in anticipation of winter storms and hoped others would find it useful. Not only as a power friendly backup, but it lowers the barriers to entry for running your own Jabber and Apache if you can't dedicate a real computer but do have an XO-1 and a spare SD card. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
