Friday, February 22, 2008

School Server in the house!

Editors note: Pictures will be added to this post as soon as I get a hold of a camera tomorrow

Well the day has finally arrived. I have successfully set up a functional OLPC XS School Server. Thanks to the folks at Nortel LearnIT, who managed to procure an active antenna for us, we finally got a chance to get started.

For the actual server , I used a system76 laptop (it's an older model which is no longer offered by them unfortunately) . Installation was simple, with a simple boot to a fedora live environment followed by an installation script. After that , the fun could begin.

After plugging in an active antenna, I then booted up an XO and it immediately connected to the server. I tested this by running "ping schoolserver" on the XO, which replied successfully, confirming connectivity and the XS servers DNS server was functioning correctly.

One thing that gave me a bit of trouble was when I attempted to register the laptop to the server. The first time I tried, both the laptop and the server froze for a long period. After they became functional again , I noticed that the laptop had failed to register. Trying it a second time however , successfully paired the laptop with the server.

As I had other classes , that was all I got to test. The good thing is that I will be bringing the server to the event at Nortel's offices tomorrow and will attempt things like patching and software distribution.

3 comments:

ffm said...

Keep in mind that this is a hypertext document. It can have links.

It would be nice if there were some links to say... where you got the CD, or a wikipage on the XS, or even an explanation on what the XS is exactly and what it lets people do.

Thomas Doggette said...

I'm looking forward to meshing around (I'm so clever) with all the XOs and the school server tomorrow. It always makes me happy when my XO does a new trick.

Anonymous said...

it would be cool to see the pics of how you've set up the antenna, and the system you're using. Do you know what the ERP (how far the signal reaches) with the antenna?