OLPC Hackathon

Braddock Gaskill - Mon 13 May 2013 -

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I've been working with a really great group of half a dozen OLPC volunteers up here in a big farmhouse in Ontario, Canada.

This group is developing a server configuration called School Server XS-CE. Their server provides DHCP, web filtering, chat, NAT firewall, backup, and other services for schools using the OLPC XO laptops. Their baseline hardware is to install on a spare OLPC XO Laptop itself with a USB Ethernet dongle for upstream.

They are very keen to integrate Internet-in-a-Box.

I have IIAB running on an XO Laptop with data on a USB hard drive, and a written procedure for installing it on the School Server.

However, IIAB is not yet ready to be packaged and deployed in this way, on the same machine as the School Server. It is easier for us to deploy as a stand-alone network appliance which the School Server discovers on the network and links to until we are more mature. The OLPC guys have written a CGI script which detects if an IIAB is on the LAN and provides a link to it.

The new version of School Server is set to be deployed in the next few months. There are 10,000 older School Servers already deployed in the world serving maybe a million kids, so this is a large market for us.

We are generating a lot of interest.


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