Platform Team/Server Kit/Architecture

External services

Thats an important part of the Server, since it should configure core services that need to be provided by a server at school. The configuration happens in GNU/Linux agnostic manner, basing on mace utility.

Mace

The mace is a tool to macke final configuration using source templates. Sources for mace are stored in GNU/Linx distribution agnostic manner in form of:

[<arbitrary-path>]/<service-name>.d/[<service-confile>]/<configuration-file>.conf

The service-confile is optional and makes sense only if configured service has several of them, e.g., Bind. The configuration-file are configuration files in particular service configuration syntax. All configuration-file files will be merged to the singular service-confile file and placed to the specific directory, depending on particular GNU/Linux distribution, by mace.

The purpose to have arbitrary-path is that there might be several directories with the same service-names to make configuration more flexible, i.e., it lets having several high-level configuration components in a project that configure the same service. Subsequent configuration might:

• supplement previous configuration by adding new configuration-files,
• override previous configuration by having the same configuration-file name with new content,
• hide previous configuration by having empty files with the same arbitrary-path or service-name name.

Such rules will be applied while walking within the root configuration directories tree when directory and file names are sorted alphabetically. The following example demonstrates virtual tree of upstream configuration with several high-level components and how downstream tunes them:

<dir>    +upstrem
<dir>    |  +0100.base
<dir>    |  |  +iptables.d
<config> |  |     +0100.conf
<dir>    |  +0300.proxy
<dir>    |     +iptables.d
<config> |     |  +0300.squid.conf
<dir>    |     +squid.d
<dir>    +downstream
<dir>       +0100.base
<dir>       |  +iptables.d
<config>    |     +0110.addons.conf
<empty>     +0300.proxy

Internal services

The Server provides basic services to support sugar based, and XO laptops in particular, infrastructure at schools. There is only one CLI tool to manage Server related functionality, sugar-server utility.