[Server-devel] Is a Community Edition of XS happening? or should it?

[George Hunt]

Hi all,

I just got the included message from Adam Holt, after his on the ground
experiences installing a school server in Madagascar, and apparently
struggling to get ejabberd working.  It points up a situation which I think
we should think about.

A lot of people I've talked to, think the School Server status quo is not
good enough. It is not meeting the needs of schools, teachers, and
students. Many are beginning to go their own way. The centrifugal force is
building:

   - OLPC Australia is looking to simplify the XS, to include just ejabberd
   for collaboration and have it run on the XO-1.75. Eliminate dhcp in favor
   of avahi, eliminate Moodle, Squid, Named. Sridhar Dhanapalan wants to get
   to the point where the individual teacher in the classroom can set it up.
   Jerry Vonau has been hired to muscle up support for the upcoming deployment
   of 50,000 XO's with one XS in each classroom.
   - In the Philippines, through bad advice, the local technicians started
   trying to use the Australia version of the XS.  They didn't have the local
   sysadmin skills to add back in named and dhcpd, which had been removed for
   Australian deployment. They're looking for a better solution.
   - Adam Holt has been soliciting ideas from the support gang for finding
   a XS solution that just works.
   - Jamaca is making Moodle central to its deployment strategy, but it
   needs some predictability in terms of school server depoyment.
   - Tony Anderson and Abhishek Singh,in the Nepal deployment, have their
   own XS image tailored to their own needs.


But I also think that the support that Boston has given to the XS has been
essential. Daniel Drake's XS-0.7 brought together many of the improvements
that have accumulated over the last few years.

Maybe we're at the point where Red Hat was, when it split the Enterprise
Linux from Fedora Core. EL would have a slower release cycle, and pick up
the features that had been well tested via the six month Fedora release
cycle.

Sridhar seems to have the energy, resources, and management skills to make
the stripped down XO-XS happen.  Tony Anderson, Sameer Verma, Abhishek
Singh have all expressed to me their willingness to contribute to some
joint effort.

>From my point of view, the challenge is to keep it simple, and to start
working towards a structure where all of us can take a small piece, work on
it, and contribute it back to the common effort.

George

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org>
Date: Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 8:03 AM
Subject: fix at last? changing XS hostname dilemmas
To: Mitchell Seaton <meaton.2v at gmail.com>, "Craig A. Perue" <
craig.perue at gmail.com>, Sameer Verma <SVerma at sfsu.edu>, George Hunt <
georgejhunt at gmail.com>, Xavier Carcelle <xavier.carcelle at gmail.com>
Cc: Alex Kleider <akleider at sonic.net>, Jerry Vonau <jvonau at shaw.ca>


Skype excerpt :)

[7:39:35 AM] Jerry Vonau: Sorry I haven't gotten back to you earlier, think
I know what the issue is with ejabberd if you change the hostname.
[7:40:01 AM] Canoe Berry: Really??
[7:40:49 AM] Jerry Vonau: ejabberd creates a pem.cert based on the hostname
when first installed, change the hostname and it becomes invalid
[7:42:54 AM] Jerry Vonau: quick fix is to delete /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.pem
and re-install ejabberd.
[7:43:40 AM] Jerry Vonau: or create your own cert and alter the config file
to use the new one instead.
[7:45:40 AM] Jerry Vonau: by the way I have ejabberd running on XO-1.75.
[7:48:54 AM] Canoe Berry: Sweet, can I forward to Craig/Sameer for Jamaica?
[7:49:15 AM] Jerry Vonau: as for the dns issue, think the model used is
flawed, you need full control over the dns, think we should be using avahi
on the XS and XO and use .local for the domain.
[7:49:37 AM] Jerry Vonau: have that working too
[7:50:02 AM] Canoe Berry: Are you suggesting Madagascar/Nosy Komba/OLPC
France's use of dsnmasq is doomed, as Mitch Seaton suspected?
[7:51:47 AM] Jerry Vonau: sort of, with the push to ip6 the clients use
ipv6 first to resolve the names and that is where the delay is introduced.
[7:52:11 AM | Edited 7:52:56 AM] Jerry Vonau: when registering

If someone can clean this up and post to server-devel at l.o that's be awesome!
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