School server
The XO school Server, or XS, is one of the products of the OLPC project, designed to complement the XO laptop. It is a Linux-based system engineered to be installed on generic low-end servers. We outline hardware recommendations and in the future, we may offer a hardware platform specially designed for the role.
When we deploy one laptop per child, we must also provide additional infrastructure extending the capabilities of the laptops. While the laptops are self-sufficient for many learning activities, other activities and services depend on the School Server providing connectivity, shared resources and services. Services, tools and activities running on the School Server allow asynchronous interaction, can use larger storage capacity, and take advantage of the processing power of the XS.
Community Edition
- XS Community Edition is a modular and teacher-friendly project, allowing XO laptops to be used as servers, modernized with Fedora 18+ and CentOS, but is not yet supported or promoted by OLPC,
- XS Community Blog, begun March 2012 by George Hunt with guest posts welcome from Sameer Verma & All!
Documentation
- Please discuss on server-devel@lists.laptop.org when editing these documents!
- XS Release Notes
- Overview of main XS Features
- XS Recommended Hardware describes the minimum hardware requirements for the School Server
- XS Installing Software has instructions for installing the latest School Server images
- XS Techniques and Configuration has important configuration options
- XS Software Testing
- XS Puppet for remote administration
- XS Controlling Presence from Moodle
- XS Managing Antitheft features
Roadmap
- There are, as of November 2011, two additional XS flavors to consider when building a new school server
- An XS image based on XS-0.6 developed by OLPC Australia
- A XS-0.6 based repackaging done by olenepal. Tony Anderson has written up a detailed install guide for the OleNepal flavor
- XS Roadmap
- Get Involved
- join the mailing list or find us on the IRC channel: #schoolserver on irc.oftc.net
- Get started with one of these easy tasks.
- Get into larger projects with these XS Project Ideas
Design proposals for future features:
- Lease and update server (Done!)
- OTP Root Passwords (Done!)
- Moodle implementation plan and XS Moodle design
- Nepal Wish List
Technical notes
- XS-XO Interactions: how does the laptop talk to the server?
- Ejabberd resource tests
- School Service Names
- School Identity Manager
- Datastore Simple Backup and Restore
- User account aliasing
- XS-on-XO - Installing the XS software on the XO hardware.
Readme Files for Key tools
- Ds-backup - backup infrastructure
- XS-rsync - the rsync publishing, used for XO OS updates.
- XS-tools - grabbag of useful utilities. The NOC team will also want this :-)
- XS Automount triggers - used by XS-activation, XS-activity-server, XS-rsync and probably others.
- XS-activation - activation lease server.
- XS-activity-server - serves packages over http.
Outdated
- XS Building Software
- XS Software Repositories
- XS LiveCD
- Server Discussion describes services and enhancements possibly supported by the School Server
- XS Server P2P Cache
- Server Services
- XS Core and Contrib
- XS DevKit
- XS Directory Layout for packagers
- Ejabberd Configuration
See also
- Using SSH Keys
- School server network debugging
- How to debug networking in a crowded environment
- Collaboration Network Testbed
- XS meeting notes