[Server-devel] XS activity server

[Douglas Bagnall]

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




[1a]http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2008-September/001957.html
[1b]http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2008-September/001958.html
[2]http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/sugar-update-control;a=blob;f=bitfrost/update/actinfo.py