[Server-devel] Server Admin Interface

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 5:15 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>  What would an administrative interface for the school server provide ?

I have been thinking a bit about this. The base XS has to be
functional - and offer services to the XOs - without any
configuration. One of the principles we have is that adults are very
likely to not understand a thing about computers, and while the kids
will figure out the XOs, the XS has to provide things like backup and
presence services automagically.

If the server *is* configured -- it will be in most cases, but perhaps
long after it has been deployed -- of course we can do lots of things
;-)


>  - change the domain name of the school
>     Coming in tonight's build to handle the mess of file editing
>  currently needed.
>     This should only be done once.   If done after ejabberd starts up
>  for the first time,
>     ejabberd will crash and refuse to run.

Interesting - we should be able to handle "late" naming of the school.

>  - configure the LAN networking.  Done automatically on first boot

Yes.

>  - configure the role of the server (is it the principal server in a
>  school, running primary
>     versions of services ? or an auxiliary server just running the
>  distributed services ?
>     This should be easily changeable (perhaps even automatic in the
>  case of a failure of
>     the principal server.)

I think we should have an automatic mechanism that is - at the same
time - stable.

>  - There needs to be an easy way to configure the WAN interface.  We
>  don't have a handle yet
>     on all the different interfaces we might have to work with
>  (PPPoE ?  PPPoA ?).
>     This might change at any time.

Agreed. Here it is impossible to autodiscover in all cases, so try
DHCP, and if it doesn't work we'll need a myriad of options.

>  There is a whole level of "school interface" needed (adding/removing
>  students, fixing
>  things after a student's laptop is replaced, etc) but that is
>  different from the admin interface
>  and needs much more careful interface design.

Yep. That's where I see Moodle or something similar for a UI. Once the
XS has seen the student laptop, rather than 'add/remove' what I thin
we want is to "name" the student. It can also be the UI to access
archived backups and associating a "new" laptop to a known student (in
the laptop-replacement case).

cheers,



martin