[Server-devel] My Observations and experiences with XSCE 0.2.1

[Richard Smith]

I want to try and make some tweaks to the ds_backup so I need a
working school server.

I grabbed a random XO 1.75 I had with 12.1.0-21 installed and tried to
install XSCE 0.2.1 but I was not successful in getting a working
config.

After installing xs-config-xo and runnign bootstrap-xo I received the message
"Not an XO pleasea run 'xs-config'" So I did. xs-config: command not found.

Searching for xs-config in the xs-config-xo package with rpm -ql I find that
xs-config is not in that that package so I took a look at bootstrap-xo
to see why it was unhappy.

It was unhappy because I have a bastard machine and I have no MN
manufacturing tag.  :)

However, looking at script I would recommnd that rather than read the
mfg tags directly you try to source
/usr/share/olpc-utils/olpc-utils-functions and use the facilties of
that script.  There are functions that will let you read mfg tags in
an XO generation independent way and functions that will let you
determine what
XO generation you are using.

I noticed several occurrences of error messages the debug output of
xs-setup a message of:

 /usr/bin/xs-setup-functions: line 242: [: missing ']'

You may want to start using [[ ]] rather than [ ] for tests as [[ ]]
is much more tolerant and supports several enhancements over [ ]

The rest of the installation appears to have gone ok except that
ejabberd didn't seem to start up.  The message was

"Failed RPC connection to the note ejabberd at schoolserver: nodedown"

On reboot various ejabber things seems to be running so perhaps that
was expected.

If I go to a root shell I don't get an expected # in my prompt.  The
difference between olpc@ and root@ is hard to notice.  I'd like to see
a # added when you are root.

Because I don't have a full deployment infra setup I ran into this
http://sugardextrose.org/issues/2685 . Also nothing in the
instructions indicate that when you set up a local AP for the XO lan
you have to disable any dhcpd server that might be running on the AP.
Obvious to me but perhaps not obvious to others and multiple dhcp
servers can be a bitch to debug.

Trying to register the XSCE with itself fails.  "Can't connect to the server"

Trying to register a client XO to the schoolsever fails as well.  The
IP the the client received looks good. I can ping schoolserver and
schoolserver.local and browsing the Internet works. Trying to browse
to http://schoolserver or schoolserver.local dosen't work.  Nmaping
the server with my laptop shows that nothing is
running on port 80.

There's nothing in /var/log/httpd but systemctrl status httpd.service
indicates there were startup errors and looking
in /var/log/messages I find that httpd is choking on line 9 of
/etc/httpd/conf.d/pathagar.conf which is:

PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython

rpm -q django shows its not installed so I tried yum -y install django
but no dice.  Still won't start up.
Ideas? I've run out of time for now to try and sort this out.

Cheers.
-- 
Richard A. Smith
One Laptop per Child