[Server-devel] Collaboration XO-1 with XS

[David Leeming]

Hi James,

I have been fairly familiar some time with using the basic default
installation of the XS. It is specifically the combination of XO-1 build 883
/ Sugar 0.94.1 with XS0-0.6 which has thrown up some issues - with
collaboration. 

A typical situation when we observe this recently: a workshop with 20
teachers, all who have freshly installed release 11.3.0 on their XO-1s and
registered on the workshop XS and restarted. All have been accessing the
Moodle pages with no problems and the links to the public content in the
/library folder. I will have been using the XS network wirelessly to an XO
that is running Classroom Broadcast Activity, with no difficult whatsoever.
So there is no need to ping the server to understand that the XOs are all
properly connected and registered, although I take your point and would have
done more diagnostics if i knew how to isolate the issue with the
collaboration problem we experienced. 

We were able to replicate the issue on identically set-up servers. The issue
is: not all the other connected XOs appear in the neighbourhood view, and
when trying to demonstrate collaboration using the set up above, it was only
rarely that the "sharing" icon appeared on other XOs neighbourhood view even
though all else seemed to be working fine. I tried using the discard network
history with a few XOs only once at the end of the workshop, and we then run
out of time. I tried again with my own setup later, using two XOs only, and
replicated the issue but the discard history did not work then. So that
might not be useful information.   

Perhaps I should rephrase my question:

Was it intended that collaboration should work with XO-1s running release
11.3.0 using the XS-0.6 default installation? 

Secondary question, if this is not working, and I have made no customisation
other than add some links using aliases presented as links on the Moodle
home page, what can I do to trouble shoot?


David Leeming


-----Original Message-----
From: quozl at us.netrek.org [mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org] On Behalf Of James
Cameron
Sent: Friday, 27 April 2012 7:39 a.m.
To: David Leeming
Cc: 'XS Devel'; 'OLPC Devel'
Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Collaboration XO-1 with XS

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 06:38:00AM +1000, David Leeming wrote:
> [...] we work around it by for instance using ?discard network
> history? which seems to help.

I was deeply involved in the "discard network history" feature at one
point in development, and at the time the only thing it did was to
remove access point names (ESSIDs) from the list of known access points.
I've just checked the code and that is still only what it does.

So I'm surprised it is having an effect.  But congratulations for
finding it does have an effect.

I know nothing about the network at the location.  Is there more than
one access point name available?

If so, at the time of the problem, the reason the button is having an
effect may be because a disconnection has led to the laptop associating
with another access point, and pressing the button would prevent that.

If not, then the button is only serving to disconnect the laptop from
the network.  You may find the same effect to occur by clicking on the
access point in the network neighbourhood view.

Lastly, whether activities are open at the time of the forced disconnect
and reconnect may be interesting.

Next time, please do some technical diagnosis at the time of the problem
... use Terminal activity to ping the server.  As I have recently seen
examples of TP-Link with OpenWRT access points that silently block data
flow, it reminds me that some diagnosis is worth doing.  In the cases I
observed, data flow was restored by reconnecting.  That you currently
reconnect to work around the problem may be a coincidence, or it might
be this same kind of problem.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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