Talk:XS Service Description

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Revision as of 17:07, 3 March 2008 by TTown (talk | contribs) (Proposed setup for non-school teaching environment)
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Interaction of Services

What I learned so far is that lighttpd seems to be involved / part off the "Presence Server"
It is listening to port 81

DansGuardian by default connects to port 81, too, and thus needs to be moved to another port.

I don't know who keeps track of the port assignments. (Probably Martin Langhoff after his recent appointment.)


Lack of Knowledge

I am afraid I don't understand the current approach to registering XOs with XS'.

  • I take it that for automated XO data backup purposes a XO will have to have a designated XS. (This connection must be releasable if the student changes schools (e.g. roughly 20% of Glen Iris Elementary School's student population changed schools last year).
  • If someone / anyone runs an XS in his basement, will that give rise to problems for XO's in the neighborhood with their "official school XS"?


Wishfull Thinking

I have been talking with local (= in the vicinity of the Birmingham, AL, USA, deployment) churches.
Some run Coffee Houses and Community Centers with wireless hotspots. They'd like to:

  • provide content filtered web access to students with XOs (while maintaining unfiltered access for their adult audience)
  • find a way of replicating the contents (--> moodle) provided by the schools in their district without having the student's XOs get problems connecting to their school's XS'. This can be seen in the context of the community centers / churches trying to help with homework and providing infrastructure in poorer neighborhoods.

Proposed setup for non-school teaching environment

A Gedankenexperiment: If I wanted to provide the community with a server (setup) that would be usefull in an after school / homework help context, what do I need to include?
In a first stage this project is targeted at poor communities in first world countries with the following properties:

  • High student density
  • Availability of ISPs
  • Availability of access points

Questions immediatly coming to my mind are:

  • How to show a moodle with reduced functionality (e.g. no turning in of assignments)
  • How to show different school's moodle content
  • Local mirroring of the latest XO build (that would also call for a way of creating a back up of the XO prior to receiving the upgrade). But this should probably stay in the school's responsibility.
  • Is there a way for this server to determine what is trying to connect to it: An XO or a different wireless device? This could help DansGuardian assigning the new client to the correct user group.