[Server-devel] Help needed to decide on distributed server controls

[Andrew van der Stock]

Hi there,

I am an OLPC contributor, working on porting my forum to the OLPC platform. I am in the architectural spike for the design of my OLPC specific changes for my forum.

You can see the forum in action here:

http://www.gaiabb.com

It's not a toy forum - I run another forum with 8400+ members, and about 670,000 posts. This categorizes me as a "Big Board" by a fair distance. Luckily, it also scales down quite well, too. 

My plans are to:

* Have a XS version that is quite traditional - it'll re-use whatever Moodle uses for the *AMP stack
* Have a distributed version that allows students to create and share forums on their XO's

Both versions will allow content replication, so if a laptop falls out of upstream forum range (either away from the school or away from the mesh network), the user can still respond to and write new forum posts, threads, polls, personal messages and so on, and for their content to be replicated the next time they see the upstream forum. 

I need advice on how best to create a start / stop / restart / share the forum service. 

On the XS, I will re-use whatever controls system services on that platform if that makes sense, but I need a way to start the replication / peering process.
On the XO, I am struggling to decide if it's an Activity or a control panel. I am leaning towards control panel as it's something you don't directly interact with. 

On either platform, I want to make sure when a forum is running, it appears in My Neighborhood as an Activity that can be shared. This would launch Browse and directly visit the remote XS / XO's forum. It would have a "Peer" or "Replicate" button, which would redirect you to a Sugar Labs Activity page (XO) or a local page on XS to download a signed installation package that gets and installs all the packages. 

Is there a way I can get the XS to be a repository for the XO's? I'd hate for folks on expensive satellite or slow modem connections to have to download the likely ~ 10 MB every time. 

Authentication on XS

Lastly, is there a NIS / LDAP service on the XS that I can use for federation? I'd really like it if the students didn't have to create new accounts on the forum, but re-use what they have already had provisioned for them from a centralized source. Worst case - I'll re-use the Moodle authentication tables - there's no reason to cause a massive system administration nightmare. 

thanks,
Andrew