[Server-devel] [XSCE] A couple of thoughts about moving forward.

[Anish Mangal]

Well, I was sort of hoping:

----
* We could start to have discussions and work around some/all of the topics
as a community. Everyone here has way more expertise than me in many (if
not all) of the topics I listed. We can build a much better server if we
all can use our expertise in the relevant part of the server. This
transcends the pure software-development aspect of XSCE.


----
* As the 0.4 version of the XSCE is nearing release, it's a good time to
start thinking about additions/changes for 0.5. One of the consistent
efforts (and demands) has been to make the server code more manageable, and
by extension, modular and scalable.

* 0.2.1 was a drop-in replacement of the XS-0.6/7
* 0.3 involved a major reorganization to make the services more modular
* 0.4 built upon that, by providing all the code in the same modular
structure

Within Activity Central, a team of developers (Santi, Miguel, Ajay, Anna)
have been working on converting services available on the XSCE into
ansible playbooks.
The playbooks are written in a syntax which is *very easy to understand*,
and the same playbook can be run on different platforms to produce the same
effect. The playbooks can provide variables which may be integrated easily
with other administration web-services (for example ajenti<http://ajenti.org/>
).

I hope to share the code for the playbooks very soon, so anyone can have a
look at and try them. We have been able to get a fully functional server up
just by playbooks and reusing/restructuring the available XSCE (xs-config)
code.

As someone leading the Dextrose Server initiative, I would push for the
inclusion of these playbooks in XSCE-0.5. There is long term value in
learning a bit of ansible and being able to work at a higher abstraction
level.

Best,
Anish

On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Tim Moody <tim at timmoody.com> wrote:

>   Thanks for making this public.  What do you see as the next step?
> >
> >From: Anish Mangal
> >Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 6:16 PM
> >To: xsce-devel at googlegroups.com ; server-devel ; Tim Moody
> >Subject: Re: [XSCE] A couple of thoughts about moving forward.
> >
> >Hi Tim, et. al.,
> >
> >Since it was requested that I share my conversations with various
> deployments over the summer yielded in form of potential requirements for
> the school server, I created this wiki page:
> >
> >https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce/wiki/Primary_considerations
> >
> >
> >There's obviously more data available, but what you see is a filtered
> version of guidelines I think we should keep in mind while developing a
> school server.
> >
> >Do the points in there (summarized below) make sense? I intentionally
> created this page on the sugardextrose.org wiki. If it has greater
> acceptance community-wide, I'd be happy to move it to the main XSCE wiki.
> >
> >* Statistics
> >* Content
> >* Internet traffic shaping
> >* Administration
> >* Networking
> >* Classroom and School management
> >* Total Cost of Ownership
> >* Power
> >* Sneakernet -> LAN -> Internet
> >* i18n
> >
> >Best,
> >Anish
> >
> >
>
> --
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>
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