[Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
Ay ay ay! This last 12 months have been frantic, as I've ended up biting off a ton more than common sense would recommend to chew. And then chewing, slowly, awkwardly. Good things have come out of the hard work of this year, but the XS has been delayed. One good piece of news is that I've helped deploy more XSs in the field, both in person and through this list. So I think we have good feedback on what to streamline and make easier. And I have a window of time to hack on it. So... the plan is roughly the same as it was in http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2009-October/004139.html - except that I'll start drafting the build on top of F14. My actual plan is to have the packages for RHEL6 / CentOS6, which will give us a more stable platform. With less churn, I get to spend more of my limited time on interesting work :-) So -- going back on the traffic we've see in the last 24 months, what would you highlight? What have people asked for (that wasn't easy/trivial/possible)? What problems have we heard that were hard to diagnose...? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Notes on Flashing the NAND over the LAN
On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: With the release of 10.1.3, I thought I'd revisit flashing an XO over the LAN. Here are my notes, if anyone's interested. Interesting! For a full reflash, as James pointed out, NANDBlaster wins. But if you have laptops out there with an earlier 10.1.x, the local XS can serve incremental update images for olpc-update :-) cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 14:29 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote: Ay ay ay! This last 12 months have been frantic, as I've ended up biting off a ton more than common sense would recommend to chew. And then chewing, slowly, awkwardly. Good things have come out of the hard work of this year, but the XS has been delayed. One good piece of news is that I've helped deploy more XSs in the field, both in person and through this list. So I think we have good feedback on what to streamline and make easier. And I have a window of time to hack on it. So... the plan is roughly the same as it was in http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2009-October/004139.html - except that I'll start drafting the build on top of F14. Anaconda will not automatically find the old install if its older than release-2, you will need to pass upgradeany at the boot prompt if you go with F14. My actual plan is to have the packages for RHEL6 / CentOS6, which will give us a more stable platform. With less churn, I get to spend more of my limited time on interesting work :-) So your going to port to F14 then RHEL6/CentOS6 and maintain the rpms for all three? So -- going back on the traffic we've see in the last 24 months, what would you highlight? What have people asked for (that wasn't easy/trivial/possible)? What problems have we heard that were hard to diagnose...? Think the biggest issue I've seen is trying to configure an XS for a pre-existing lan using a single interface. The stock network layout is a bit much for a novice, and can get confusing quickly. Jerry ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
On 18 January 2011 19:29, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: So -- going back on the traffic we've see in the last 24 months, what would you highlight? What have people asked for (that wasn't easy/trivial/possible)? What problems have we heard that were hard to diagnose...? Some items that spring to mind: 1. activity-server support for dotted activities 2. can't register if your name includes a : 3. automatic olpc-update via OATS (code was posted, but we never finished deciding exactly how to integrate it) ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
Great news, looking forwards to 0.7 I think three areas where we had some difficulties. 1. Perhaps making the default install easier to set eth0 up for static config 2. Not sure if it is relevant to the build, but we would have enjoyed an easy way to clone from a master, i.e. when setting up a customised XS for a number of schools 3. We had difficulties running the olpcxs update (yum --enablerepo .) at times, and although we couldn't always replicate the problem it seemed to be related to clock/date/time skew I have never tried selecting the Gnome option, but a nice GUI would be useful for users with limited grasp of command line stuff for file management. Maybe that is available already David Leeming Solomon Islands Rural Link -Original Message- From: server-devel-boun...@lists.laptop.org [mailto:server-devel-boun...@lists.laptop.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Drake Sent: Wednesday, 19 January 2011 7:28 a.m. To: Martin Langhoff Cc: XS Devel Subject: Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please... On 18 January 2011 19:29, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: So -- going back on the traffic we've see in the last 24 months, what would you highlight? What have people asked for (that wasn't easy/trivial/possible)? What problems have we heard that were hard to diagnose...? Some items that spring to mind: 1. activity-server support for dotted activities 2. can't register if your name includes a : 3. automatic olpc-update via OATS (code was posted, but we never finished deciding exactly how to integrate it) ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:31 PM, David Leeming da...@leeming-consulting.com wrote: I have never tried selecting the Gnome option, but a nice GUI would be useful for users with limited grasp of command line stuff for file management. Maybe that is available already David Leeming Solomon Islands Rural Link Managing a system with Gnome sounds seductive, but I can't think of a faster way to bork up a server than to let a novice admin loose in GUI tools with root powers. For file management, say a user level directory under /var/www/html, far better to mount it with sshfs from a remote system (there's even a Windows tool for that called dokan). That way you can have the ease of a GUI filesystem tool without the risks of actually running a Window Manager on the server itself. Not to mention installing Gnome and X Windows and all the deps takes a ton of space. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
OK point taken! We have used WinSCP on networked Windows PCs too, for this purpose. David Leeming Solomon Islands Rural Link From: Anna [mailto:ascho...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, 19 January 2011 10:11 a.m. To: David Leeming Cc: XS Devel Subject: Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please... On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 4:31 PM, David Leeming da...@leeming-consulting.com wrote: I have never tried selecting the Gnome option, but a nice GUI would be useful for users with limited grasp of command line stuff for file management. Maybe that is available already David Leeming Solomon Islands Rural Link Managing a system with Gnome sounds seductive, but I can't think of a faster way to bork up a server than to let a novice admin loose in GUI tools with root powers. For file management, say a user level directory under /var/www/html, far better to mount it with sshfs from a remote system (there's even a Windows tool for that called dokan). That way you can have the ease of a GUI filesystem tool without the risks of actually running a Window Manager on the server itself. Not to mention installing Gnome and X Windows and all the deps takes a ton of space. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
Reporting mechanisms would be useful, such as: Squid reporting for the locations with internet access. I've played around with sarg for ad-hoc reports, which really came in handy when I got claims that the internet doesn't work. Not only is it up, but here's what folks are looking at. On an ongoing basis, maybe sarg generated reports in a password protected Apache dir so teachers and administrators can browse them. Bandwidth and Device Reporting. I heard fears that with open wifi, everyone and their brother would leech the XS's internet. So I use dhcpstatus and vnstat to generate a simple daily report counting how many XOs, how many other devices, and how much traffic there was. http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2010-April/004809.html Even if a location doesn't have internet access, daily reporting of the number of unique XOs that got IP addresses would probably be informative. At least you'd have a quick way to see how many XOs are being brought to school and be able to track that over time. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
On Tue, 2011-01-18 at 20:28 +, Daniel Drake wrote: On 18 January 2011 19:29, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: So -- going back on the traffic we've see in the last 24 months, what would you highlight? What have people asked for (that wasn't easy/trivial/possible)? What problems have we heard that were hard to diagnose...? Some items that spring to mind: 1. activity-server support for dotted activities That sucks the dotted versions don't display when you regenerate the html page. Is there a patch I can test by any chance? 2. can't register if your name includes a : 3. automatic olpc-update via OATS (code was posted, but we never finished deciding exactly how to integrate it) add: xs-rsync support for XO-1.5 with the change to lzma Jerry ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
Even if a location doesn't have internet access, daily reporting of the number of unique XOs that got IP addresses would probably be informative. At least you'd have a quick way to see how many XOs are being brought to school and be able to track that over time. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham Strongly agree! David ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
Martin, I was about to email you regarding what is the latest XS version as I am about to get back to attempting to port the XS to ARM so your email is timely to me. I had put that on hold for quite a while as it turned out Fedora ARM 11/12 lacked a number of items required by the XS. The Fedora 13 ARM port is intended to be a complete a port as possible and should have the bits required as a base for the XS. After the Fedora 13 ARM port is released it is my understanding that the Fedora 14 ARM port will be started. I hope you keep the Fedora RPMs as RHEL6/CentOS6 do not support ARM. I have been experimenting with ARM devices as servers with low power consumption and I want to prove the viability of using them as an XS. The systems I have are based on the Marvell Kirkwood, (not quite as fancy as the Armada 610). If successful this would be an asset that uses little electricity and would help with deployments in locations where electricity and server room cooling is expensive. In my review of the make files for XS-0.6 I have noticed that the architecture is hardcoded in a number of places. It would be nice if these were parameterized. The other area that seems a bit strange is how flat the git is for the XS components. They all seem to be at the top level. It would be nice if they hung off a top level XS project directory with a master make file that passed arch type, etc., to the component make files. This would make it simpler to clone all the bits. If you want to read more about the Fedora ARM project here are several links:- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM http://arm.koji.fedoraproject.org http://arm.koji.fedoraproject.org/status In closing I would like to say, I do not think most administrators would care about RHEL6 or CentOS. In fact they may prefer the modern up to date Fedora 14 features. Thanks rihowa...@gmail.com On Jan 18, 2011, at 11:29 AM, Martin Langhoff wrote: Ay ay ay! This last 12 months have been frantic, as I've ended up biting off a ton more than common sense would recommend to chew. And then chewing, slowly, awkwardly. Good things have come out of the hard work of this year, but the XS has been delayed. One good piece of news is that I've helped deploy more XSs in the field, both in person and through this list. So I think we have good feedback on what to streamline and make easier. And I have a window of time to hack on it. So... the plan is roughly the same as it was in http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2009-October/004139.html - except that I'll start drafting the build on top of F14. My actual plan is to have the packages for RHEL6 / CentOS6, which will give us a more stable platform. With less churn, I get to spend more of my limited time on interesting work :-) So -- going back on the traffic we've see in the last 24 months, what would you highlight? What have people asked for (that wasn't easy/trivial/possible)? What problems have we heard that were hard to diagnose...? cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS-0.7 plans -- your thoughts please...
On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 11:12 PM, rihowa...@gmail.com rihowa...@gmail.comwrote: In closing I would like to say, I do not think most administrators would care about RHEL6 or CentOS. In fact they may prefer the modern up to date Fedora 14 features. Thanks rihowa...@gmail.com Seconded. Sticking to Fedora 14 would allow a lot more flexibility, keep support mostly on the same page, and lend a certain comfort level to existing admins for upgrading. And there's a lot more online support for Fedora than for CentOS or RHEL. Anna Schoolfield Birmingham ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
