School Server/RIT

For RIT Honors Seminar project.

School Server Fall 2009 Seminar Project

(Draft, please contribute)

Purpose

Provide a school server test and development environment for the Honors Seminar participants,
Develop School Server systems administration skills,
1. Backup registered XOs or Sugar Sticks
2. Host Moodle content developed in class
Test and Debug OLPC - Sugar Labs School Server software
Develop a School Server SysAdmin training curriculum for volunteers who want to support an OLPC or Sugar deployment

Resources

RIT LTL or other hardware
OLPC XS development builds, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel and the list archives, archive with search
OLPC projects/xs repository, http://dev.laptop.org/git/?q=projects%2Fxs
Martin Langhoff's git repository, http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/martin/

schoolserver.rit.edu

Note: Admin log is located on the server at /var/log/adminlog.log

Project Ideas

Fix Ejabber
Configure Moodle to our needs
- Create an Activity(Application) for RIT XOs so students can easily access Moodle
Moodle xo python api
XO Backup/Restore
XO Security [1]
Deployment "whitebook"
Provide a service that allows teachers/volunteers (who don't speak English) in actual deployments to communicate via email with technical support volunteers by using the translating service Pootle. Incoming and outgoing "tagged" emails would be translated in and out of the server on arrival / departure of the XS.
Library /Book Reader. Thousands of books stored on the XS which children are able to pull over the network either as whole book or bit by bit as they read them on their XO's.
- Additionally, they can "check out" books and bring them home on their laptops to read at home, or while not connected to the XS.
- This may prove to be more economical than the proposal of distributing text via SDcards as it would allow for a wider range of content per available Gigabyte. One 40 gig hard disk library would hold 10 times as much content as ten, 4-GB SDcards replicated with identical content.
- Run said books through Pootle, so children have access to books not in their native tongue.
- Essentially, a backend to the read activity.
In class quizzing. Teachers ask questions, students respond using their XO, quiz results stored on XS. (Think the I>clicker) I believe similar concepts were proposed by Alex Jones
- Possibility of parsing of information, possible graphical heuristics.
- Is this already a feature of Moodle? (quiz module) / Possible integration or extension of idea with Moodle.

Reading Library

Some resources:

Design Goals

Hold copies of ebooks for learners with no Internet access
Compatible with existing Sugar ebook readers
Teacher/administrator interface for loading books from a variety of Internet book archives and portable USB or CD/DVD storage media.

In the end, we want to have instructions and some supporting scripts to modify the standard OLPC School Server to support our campus environment.

Completed Tasks

Network configuration

The School Server, XS, as received is designed and configured for 2 Ethernet adapters,

eth0 - connected to the wide area network (WAN) or the campus Internet connection,
eth1 - connected to an access point (AP) which the XOs connect to.

For robustness in unreliable power supply environments, there are scripts that reconfigure features on a frequent basis. This design has frustrated anyone wanting to deviate from the default configuration.

We will have to understand the design, carefully document our adjustments for our environment, and make preparations to restore one or more configurations once we upgrade to a new version of the server that may likely restore some of the default configurations.