[Server-devel] Experimental schoolserver tweaks - Moodle upgrade and alternative name support for XO builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I have two experimental schoolserver tweaks available for those who are
interested.

These are not officially supported, have only seen light testing, and may
break in interesting ways, so please use caution if you choose to try them
out.  Testing these with school servers or XO builds used by students may
not be advisable unless you have a good backup strategy.

Until 13.1.0 comes out, my available time to work on these is limited.


   1. The first experimental item I have is a Moodle update for
   schoolservers which upgrades Moodle from version 1.9.5 to 1.9.19.  As the
   version numbers imply, this includes a significant number of upstream
   updates and fixes.

   XO-based authentication, antitheft control, and general Moodle usage
   still seem to function after the update, but I have not done extensive
   testing.  No config.php changes are required but there are a few settings
   that may be of interest.

   A RPM packaged version of the Moodle update is available from
   http://dev.laptop.org/~greenfeld/xs/ .  The git source repository can be
   seen at http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/greenfeld/moodle/ (please note
   that the merge commit is huge).


   2. The second item I have is a kludge for olpc-os-builder which can
   create XO installation images altered to allow XOs to be used with
   schoolservers which cannot be accessed by the DNS name of "schoolserver".

   There are many reasons this occurs, including but not limited to: the
   schoolserver being prohibited from controlling the network XOs are on; a
   desire for more than one school to use the same XS; a flat DNS structure
   used by more than one school; etc.

   This support appears as a set of patches to olpc-os-builder found
   attached to the enhancement ticket at http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/12156.

   Altering a schoolserver to use a DNS name other than "schoolserver"
   currently is messy, with lots of files requiring edits.  While I did test
   this against a XS modified to use a different name, I have not had the
   chance to write a script to automate the process.


---
SJG
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