[Server-devel] XS activity server

[Jerry Vonau]

Douglas Bagnall wrote:
> I wrote about this last week on the server-devel list[1], but in
> hindsight that was the wrong place to catch people interested in
> activities.
> 
> XS 0.5 will make html microformatted indexes of all the activities it
> has, localised for whatever languages the activities have translations
> for.  Apache's content negotiation magic will make
> http://schoolserver/activities as localised as possible for each
> laptop.
> 
> The activities on the server can be updated via USB drives.  It would
> be uncomplicated to make mirroring work for internet connected
> servers.
> 
> So, my question is: what is the best way to make the laptops look at
> the school server for updates?
> 
> At some point squid trickery was suggested and met considerable
> opposition.  Another way would be a patch to
> bitfrost/update/actinfo.py [2] thus:
> 
> -DEFAULT_UPDATE_URL = "http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities"
> +DEFAULT_UPDATE_URL = "http://schoolserver/activities"
> 
> But that of course is painful for XS-less set ups.  Another way would
> be to try a series of URLs, with an inevitable delay for some.  Or the
> XO could remember where it got each activity and try there first.
> 
> I'd appreciate any guidance.
> 
> Douglas
> 

Use bind to resolve wiki.laptop.org to be that of the local XS server?
Not too sure if that would break anything else.

or

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.

Either way just use the same path on the local server, ie: 
"http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities"
"http://schoolserver/go/activities"

Jerry