[Server-devel] Looking for new low power server hardware candidate

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On 12 April 2012 15:27, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:57 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan
> <sridhar at laptop.org.au> wrote:
>> Why is it such a bad idea?
>>
>> The thought was to do away with registration, moodle and other
>> unnecessary services and focus only on the XMPP server.
>
> You want to run a network of federated XMPP servers? It's madness.
>
> Rather, it's not madness, but until demonstrated/automated otherwise
> it's a high-maintenance-per-classroom setup. And the federated XMPP
> stuff isn't widely used ==> widely tested.
>
> We get obvious and clear bugs in parts of the XMPP implementation that
> are used (or should be used) _everywhere_. And this is on what is
> reportedly the best XMPP implementation available. My appetite for
> putting an exotic feature into use in the _middle_ of a deployment
> plan is... just not there.
>
> In any case, what's the upside of one-XS-per-classroom? Cost,
> administration, reliance on federated-XMPP all seem downsides/risks to
> me.

Not federated - far simpler than that.

The current XS requires administration - sysadmin admin to set up and
moodle admin to manage registrations and set up segregation. This is
not workable in our school environments, and hence we have stopped
using XS schoolservers.

The scenario that I'm thinking of is that each teacher (who has no
technical skill whatsoever) receives an XS plug-and-play appliance,
consisting of an XO with XS software installed. All the teacher has to
do is to turn on the machine and connect it to the network. The
appliance runs nothing more than ejabberd. There's no moodle, dhcp,
dns or other services.

Then the children just set a collaboration server to connect to in the
Network CP applet. They use the address of the appliance for their
classroom. This achieves a segregation effect in a simple way.

I think this could be created with relatively little effort, as all we
are doing is scaling back an XS. There is no additional configuration
required such as federation.

We have ideas to extend this scenario. For instance, the appliances
could advertise themselves on the network, and then the children need
only click on the server they want to be on. The teacher could plug a
USB drive with content into the appliance, and have the children
download exercises and upload homework.

As I mentioned, this is just an idea right now.

Sridhar