XS Configuration Management

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

This page describes how the software packages comprising an XS School server are configured.

This page is sadly unfinished.

Server Configuration

Configuration of packages

School Specific Configuration

The default server setup is to connect to the Internet on the first wired ethernet network interface, using IPv4 DHCP. Laptops connect to the server over the wireless mesh using one or more Active Antenna, connected through USB interfaces. Optional second (and additional) ethernet interfaces are configured by default to provide an internal LAN within the school. Traditional WiFi access points, if used, should be located on this internal LAN.

We are working on a better configuration interface. Suggestions are welcome in the discussion page.

For now, the configuration is mainly manual.

Network

The school specific configuration is largely done by a script, /etc/init.d/olpc-network-config, run upon every boot. Upon the first boot, this script runs the /etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/network_config.py script, which configures the network interfaces for the machine.

This script (network_config.py) may be run manually to reconfigure a system in response to a change in the wired interfaces.

Internet Connection

The internet (WAN) connection is currently the eth0 interface by default. The file which configures this interface is /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. The current default is to use DHCP to assign an IP address to this interface, and obtain DNS server info.

IPv6

To enable external IPv6 you will have to configure the global address of the machine and setup an IPv6 tunnel.

Instructions coming

Name Service

Manual Configuration

This name currently set to random.xs.laptop.org is unfortunately embedded in a number of files:

/etc/named.conf
/var/named/school.zone.inaddr.db
/var/named/school.zone.16.inaddr.db
/var/named/school.zone.32.inaddr.db
/var/named/school.zone.48.inaddr.db

User Accounts

When a school server is installed, it has no user accounts, remote (SSH) login to the root account is disabled, and remote logins must be authenticated using a public/private key pair. If exploring or developing with a school server, as root from the console you will need to add a new account (username wad in the example):

adduser wad
passwd wad
wget http://dev.laptop.org/~wad/dsa_public_key
mkdir /home/wad/.ssh
mv dsa_public_key /home/wad/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown -R wad:wad /home/wad/.ssh

The public key, downloaded from http://dev.laptop.org/~wad/dsa_public_key in the above example, can be generated on any Linux system using the ssh-keygen command (which leaves your new public/private key pair in .ssh). You want to copy the id_rsa.pub or id_dsa.pub file to other machines to allow logins.