On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Alexander Dupuy <alex.du...@mac.com> wrote: > Hi Walter and Wade, > > It's been a while since you wrote these, but I had wanted to reply and just > now got around to it. > >> On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 4:49 PM, Walter Bender <walter.ben...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> >>> ===Sugar Digest === >>> I was able >>> to get the network working but the process is tedious—I don't think we >>> can expect teachers and youn children to use ifconfig, route, etc. >>> from the shell. I also had to boot each machine in Windows, get the IP >>> address, netmask, gateway, and DNS, but this is something that needs >>> only to be done once per machine. Configuring the network on Sugar on >>> a Stick has to happen every time, presuming the children will be >>> jumping from machine to machine. A control panel widget for setting up >>> a static IP address is a first step, but I wonder if there is an >>> easier way. >>> >> >> > > Wade Brainerd replied: >> >> In the long term, what about enabling freedesktop.org standard panel >> applets to appear in the frame, and then just using nm-panel for >> network configuration? >> >> The access points could then be removed from the Neighborhood view. >> > > Something else that you might want to consider would be using link-local > addresses (Zeroconf) for most of the Sugar machines, and having one or a few > Sugar systems manually configured to provide a NAT routing service ("IP > proxy") with a caching DNS relay, that would allow the link-local-addressed > systems to communicate with the internet and other (non-link-local) machines > on the network. This way you would only need to manually configure a > handful of machines (or even just the teacher's) rather than the entire > classroom. While not as efficient or desirable as a proper DHCP > configuration, it does provide a mechanism that allows you to bootstrap up > on the network with only a minimal amount of configuration, and without any > possibility of conflicts with existing networking setups that you would get > by trying to bring up a new DHCP server. > > While I'm not 100% sure of this, I believe that some (or maybe even all?) of > this already exists (or existed) on the OLPC distributions - I think that > the mesh networking uses link-local addresses (at least in some cases) and I > remember reading that XO systems with a second network interface would act > as Internet gateways for the machines that only had mesh connections. I > don't know whether this functionality is still present or working (it might > have been removed or just suffered from bit rot due to Fedora version > changes) but it would certainly be something that could be used as a > starting point for implementing this for Sugar on a stick. > > Link-local addresses are trivially easy to configure for IPv6 (you actually > have to go to some effort to *not* use them), and Fedora supports link-local > 169.254.*.* addresses for IPv4 as well. Sugar would have to provide a > configuration mechanism (this could be tied to the configuration of a static > IP address) that would set up the "IP proxy" NAT routing service for other > machines using link-local addresses (the NAT conversion would map link-local > endpoints to unused UDP/TCP ports on the routing system) - while I have > never done such a thing, it should certainly be possible, and perhaps > someone on the networking list has done this already for non-link-local > networking configurations, and could provide more details on the necessary > configuration. > > Once you had support for the "IP proxy" enabled, you would need to advertise > that service via multicast DNS, and add something to the default Sugar > configuration that (if a link-local address was the only IP address > available) would attempt to do a lookup for available "IP proxies" and > choose one for installation as a default gateway router (and DNS resolver). > Fedora already includes the Avahi tools that you would use for this - it > would pretty much be a matter of configuration and adding a script or two > that manages this during networking startup. If this is tested out and > found to be useful, you could probably even get Fedora upstream to pick up > the relevant changes to the networking startup scripts (as long as the > scripts do not fail if link-local addresses are unavailable and/or the Avahi > tools are not installed). > > It probably would be best to implement this as an IPv4-only service > initially, then look at the possibility of adding an IPv6/IPv6 service, > eventually looking at IPv6/IPv4 tunneling and/or proxy options as well. > > Finally, the "IP proxy" NAT service would be something that it would make > sense to add to the "school server" distributions as and when this is > adopted by Sugar systems. > > @alex > -- > mailto:alex.du...@mac.com > > > >
Another approach, suggested by Wad, is to simply set up a DHCP server with the list of machines/IP address. (Presumably we can use such an arrangement on the School Server.) -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel