I think my biggest technical concerns in XS-land are twofold: * we need the XS to behave well on an *existing* network (i.e. single interface), without trying to be a gateway or duplicating core network services (DNS, DHCP, etc.) * while other XS efforts are keen to add features, we want to be as trim as possible
We started the XS-AU when it had become clear that XS development had slowed. We could find no alternative that satisfied our needs, and I felt it better to go our own way rather than complaining that the XS didn't meet our particular use case (which seems to be quite different from other deployments). It's been working very well, and it's quite low-maintenance for us. We'll need a good reason to jump ship. We've been working on a prototype "XS Lite", which is essentially an XS-AU with everything except ejabberd stripped away. Our deployments are done at the classroom-level; a teacher receives XOs for the children in their class once they have completed the necessary training. We would like to provide a simple server with that allocation of XOs. This means that the server needs to be low-cost and easy to implement (plug-and-play). We are assuming that there is *no* technical expertise available at the school. The server doesn't have to be very capable. Anything that requires registration won't work for us as the turnover of teachers and students is too high. We don't need Moodle or anything similar, since such services are already provided on the state education network. Since it's based on the XS-AU, it can be 'upgraded' to a full XS with some yum commands. Given the modest requirements, I think an XO would be suitable hardware. They are cheap and reliable, and we already have them in stock. As a standalone collaboration server, the XO's WLAN can be the AP. If we need to connect to the school network, we can use a USB2Ethernet adapter. This will also allow the server to leverage the other APs in the school. What's important is that we need to be tolerant of multiple schoolservers on the network, potentially one per class. Sridhar Sridhar Dhanapalan Technical Manager One Laptop per Child Australia M: +61 425 239 701 E: srid...@laptop.org.au A: G.P.O. Box 731 Sydney, NSW 2001 W: www.laptop.org.au _______________________________________________ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel