[Server-devel] Server Admin Interface

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 6:00 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>  Yeah, so one would think.   ejabberd is the only barrier to being able
>  to do so at this time.   We can contract to get an erlang script
>  for fixing up the mnesia database if we continue to use ejabberd.

There's a resident Erlang/ejabberd expert at Catalyst. I'll see what
he thinks about the whole thing.

>  But once laptops are registered with a school, they are registered to
>  the FQDN of the school.   If you change the domain name
>  you will currently orphan a lot of laptops.
>
>  Longer term, I want to see a datastore architecture that doesn't have
>  this limitation.  A school server is just an intermediate cache of a
>  student's
>  data.

200% in agreement. I'll keep that in mind as I learn about the arch we have.

>  Moving to another school (or between schools) thus works just
>  fine (with a long latency when accessing data not already cached on a
>  particular school's servers), as does operation after graduation from
>  a school.

Agreed. There's a trick there in making the 'moving' permanent as
opposed to temporary. In any case, if we come up with a half-decent
distributed storage/repluication strategy, it should work
transparently. It will have to -- in a town with several schools, kids
may be covered at home by a mesh net associated to another school.

>  But that is still in the formative stages (and requires countries to
>  foot the
>  bill for large centralized data centers.)

The big disk in the sky :-) We might be able to bypass that...

>     A manual override would work fine for starters.   It's pretty
>  stable !
>
>    I would prefer to spend the effort improving the reliability of
>  the servers
>    than working on automatic switchover methods.   One easy modification
>    planned is to move the core OS and services onto a Flash disk, so
>  that
>    networking continues to operate even after a disk failure.

Agreed. Stable and simple over fancy, anytime.

cheers,


m