[Server-devel] XS activity server

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Jerry Vonau <jvonau at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Use bind to resolve wiki.laptop.org to be that of the local XS server?
> Not too sure if that would break anything else.

Running a split horizon dns breaks access to the wiki :-/

> You could use iptables here to pick out the web traffic bound for
> wiki.laptop.org just like the squid rules but using -d <ipaddress> to
> redirect to the local webserver.

If we are using squd, we can use the "per url" redirector. But clients
will do their own DNS lookup, and that gets us back to split horizon
DNSs.

The whole thing is rather messy. We control the server and the client,
I would want to come up with a simple (and cheap) euristic on the
client side that says "am I in the school server network?" and if
that's true, tries http://schoolserver/somepath first.

In fact, we recently realised that the problem is more involved than
the description posted earlier by Douglas: Once an activity is
installed on the XO, the activity metadata may have a URL that will
point to the author's download page. Those URLs are not known in
advance by the XS (unless we get into a nasty business of unpackign
the metadata and guessing).

If the client code reads the metadata and attempts to find an updated
version in http://schoolserver/Activities first, then the whole
problem goes away...

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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