[Server-devel] How-to make the XS appear in the neighbourhood view of the XOs

[Jerry Vonau]

On Sun, 2012-06-03 at 20:45 -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> I have pondered this, along with "enterprise" (larger school) XS
> installations in general.
> 

The thought I was having was to run the XS on XO hardware(or some cast
off old hardware), but employ several per school(maybe one per class). 

> The XS typically does not control its wifi AP, so it can only be
> easily shown when when users associate to its AP.  This is not
> necessarily a problem, as XOs only see each other on the same network
> in a similar manner.
> 

Yes, that is what you run into when your trying to deploy an XS in a
pre-existing network. Having more that one XS on the same local lan
becomes problematic when the XOs only look for the alias "schoolserver" 
Not to mention the fun with dhcp and adding dns records for
"schoolserver".

> Re-enabling the Avahi service on XS 0.7 would allow the server to be
> visible to XOs running Salut, as long as they were on the same
> network.  (It's possible to work around this same-network limit; but
> that would be a kludge.)
> 

That would be ok with me, got to start somewhere.

> It then would be a matter of incorporating the XS's mDNS entry it into
> the network view.
> 
> However this seems somewhat silly to do for one XS.  Several support
> utilities also would have to be altered to respect Sugar's choice.
> Depending how XO's are setup they might accept DNS lookups via
> mDNS(*); so I might take a stab at seeing what happens when an XS
> advertises "schoolserver" locally even though the more formal DNS
> system disagrees with that.
> 

I was thinking of removing the hard-coding of "schoolserver" from the XS
and having the rest of the software stack just use the hostname that is
currently configured on the XS. Think if the hostnames/alaises/nicknames
differ but advertise an XS registration service this idea just might
fly.

> Something else I've thought about (which would take more work) is
> exposing any classes the XS knows about so students easily can "Join"
> a class that is currently in session.  This would be especially
> helpful if students move from teacher to teacher during the day and do
> not stay in one group.
> 

That seems like a good idea also. I'm looking for a way to eliminate the
need to have any IT skills to deploy an XS, plug-n-turnon is what the
goal is.

> (*) I don't see this supported on recent 11.3.1 or 12.1.0 builds; but
> for some reason I'm thinking this is either a regression or
> intentional change.
> 

Do you recall which version of sugar this last worked with?

Jerry