[Server-devel] Serving 400+ students w/ a single central XS - ejabberd nightmare?

[Marten Vijn]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 15:57 +0545, Bryan Berry wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-03-09 at 21:51 -0700, Sameer Verma wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 09:58 +1300, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> > >> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> > >> > I am worried about the XO's and not the XS.
> > >>
> > >> Now you're starting to see what I've seen :-/ I also worry about your
> > >> APs and networking infra -- to support 400 active users you'll want at
> > >> least 8 APs. In more realistic terms, you'll probably need 12,
> > >> assuming a reasonably balanced load.
> > >
> > > We will have roughly 8+ AP's. We have found that off-the-shelf AP's can
> > > handle around 60-70 users.  But that doesn't still doesn't solve the
> > > problem of the XO's getting bogged down by tons of ejabberd chatter.
> > >
> > > DSD: do you have any ideas about this?

about infra;

Last year we had about 500 devices in the network on 5 ap's using
atheros card and soekris/wrap boards in ApacheCon 2008.

In a couple of of weeks I do it again with some friends. Details you can
read on 
http://bsd.wifisoft.org/nek

raw out lines of our course are in moodle
http://wifisoft.org/moodle (log as guest)

and tech details are in svn
http://bsd.wifisoft.org/svn/projects/nek

cheatlists and standards we use:
http://bsd.wifisoft.org/svn/projects/nek/doc/
 

I was curious if someone tested in BULLET2 in heavy traffic,
if it is stable it migth be someting.
http://www.roc-noc.com/product.php?productid=164
It should capable to run openwrt, but i don't know it is stable enough.
But it would allow good monitoring and tuning. 

As soon as if a change/time I'll test these. But if you pls let me
know. 
 

kind regards,
Marten  


> > >
> > > We are looking at about 100-150 students per school and connecting 3-4
> > > schools to a central XS.
> > >
> > >> As I mentioned before... I am working on xs-0.6, with the
> > >> moodle-ejabberd magic.
> > >
> > > That's great, but our pilot starts in a month but that doesn't fit our
> > > timeline. I don't want to send out a completely new, untested XS into
> > > rural parts of Nepal.
> > >
> > > Do you have any other suggestions fo us?
> > >
> > 
> > What if you had a small footprint box (like a soekris or routerboard)
> > at the school that talks to APs on one end via a switch, and does
> > tunneling back to XS in a central location? That way you would have a
> > fairly dumb tunnel unit at school (literally plug-and-play) and XS
> > management back at your central shop.
> > 
> > Sameer
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion Sameer.
> 
> I don't really understand what benifits the soekris or routerboard adds
> in this situation? Can u pls explain further?
> 
> 
-- 
http://martenvijn.nl                 Marten Vijn 
http://martenvijn.nl/trac/wiki/soas  Sugar on a Stick
http://bsd.wifisoft.org/nek/         The Network Event Kit
http://har2009.org                   13th-16th August 
http://opencommunitycamp.org         26th Jul - 2nd August