Inside the OLPC School Server

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Hardware

See also School Server Specification#Hardware

Software

See also School Server Specification#Software.

LAMPS + Moodle

Backup

School Server Specification#Backup

Content

See also School Server Specification#Library

  • Wikipedia subset

Administration

  • Updates
  • Updating XOs
  • Student and Teacher accounts
  • E-mail
  • Data exchange on non-Internet-connected servers

Troubleshooting and Repair

Troubleshooting School Servers

Other pages

Hardware specification

School Server Hardware

While the laptop is rightfully at the center of OLPC, a valuable peripheral is the school server. OLPC will be building and distributing school servers along with the laptops, to extend the storage and computation provided by each laptop, as well as providing a local library and a mesh portal to the Internet.

Unlike the laptop, the school server is more of a collection of services than a hardware platform. In a manner identical to the laptop, OLPC will collaborate with manufacturing partners to provide a cost-efficient hardware platform for running the recommended software. Unlike the laptop, the manufacturing collaboration will not be exclusive. Individual countries will be free (even encouraged) to design and manufacture their own school servers running derivatives of the OLPC school server software.

XS

This will be the school server designed by OLPC. It is mostly designed, but currently on hold as we reconsider manufacturers, and should reach early production volumes in spring 2008. See the specification.

XSX

XSX limited-production prototype school server. The actual XS school servers won't look anything like this.

This is a prototype school server, built for early school trials in country. It will be integrated from off-the-shelf components, and will be overpowered compared to a production school server in order to simplify early demands for system software. See the specification and the implementation.

School server

When we deploy one laptop per child, we must also provide additional infrastructure extending the capabilities of the laptops. While the laptops are largely self-sufficient, a mesh portal providing connectivity and shared resources greatly extends their utility.

These persistent services required by OLPC laptops could conceivably be implemented in a fully distributed manner. They are , however, currently provided more economically by a centralized local resource, the school server. The functions provided by this server are open to debate, but at a minimum they include internet communication and storage resources to the school's wireless mesh.

Currently, the School server is described by these documents:

See also

This article is a documentation stub, an outline for a real manual. Maybe it should be expanded, maybe it should be killed — discuss..