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Adopting OLPC's XS server

Offline TTown

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Adopting OLPC's XS server
« on: February 27, 2008, 04:08:03 PM »
Hello EVERYBODY!

I come here with a proposal of the magnitude I have never posted - nor thought of - before.

I am working on a volunteer basis with the One Laptop Per Child http://laptop.org program's school server setup.
And I am utterly disappointed with their way of administrating the school server. I wouldn't have been, had I not a CentOS SME server running at home proving that "all"  their tasks (dansguardian, moodle, squid, apache) can be handeled/administrated in a non-geek way. Very smoothly, securely, and efficiently.
The OLPC project will IMHO suffer performance and acceptance problems for lack of administrability. And that would be a REAL DESASTER.
Btw:  I never wrote all capitalized words in a posting before either...
How do you - as members of the CentOS SME community - feel about adopting a worth while cause and help olpc getting the project to a state where it so badly needs to be?
Adopt the server administration! Do what you are good (exellent !!!) at. Currently they are running fedora based, but that is NOT set in stone. Change for the better is welcome!

They have a few special needs, mainly stemming from their "Mesh Networking" capabilities and administrating clients that don't have knowledgeable users (6 - 12 year olds). And they have a bitfrost http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost based security concept. But security and CentOS seem to me as getting along very well. But beyond that it seems it is all about administrating networked laptops (running an also fedora based distro).

The real network issues are beyond me (they could, though,  be addresse to olpc's server-development mailing list http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel), but what I see is, were the OLPC server to have an administrative interface like the SME server, this project would be inevitably bound for success, unlike what I fear right now. Now it will have success, because the project has this huge impact (and supporter base) from a global perspective, but it will also impose lots of pain on many non-geek admins. And thus will suffer needlessly.

PLEASE consider this proposal.


Best regards
Stefan Reitz
« Last Edit: February 27, 2008, 04:12:59 PM by TTown »
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