Post-mortem on WMF Server Donation

Of the 12 servers sent to Sugar Labs, 6 arrived at the Arlington Career Center. Three of them stayed there, whereas I brought three home to attempt to salvage what I could from them. The three that arrived are described below.

wmf-01 "le premier"

2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 285 @ 2606.342 MHz
2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty
2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs

This machine worked swimmingly.

wmf-02 "something witty"

2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 265 @ 1800.000 MHz
2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty
2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs

This machine was incredibly noisy when turned on.

wmf-03 "lemon"

2x Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 265 @ 1800.000 MHz
2x 250 GB HDDs, 2x slots empty
2 Gigabit Ethernet NICs

This machine did not fully POST, and was incredibly noisy when turned on.

Between them, only one of them had working fans. The other two made ungodly noises. We managed to salvage enough fans from the machine that didn't post so that we now have two working machines cooling-wise.

We hope to install these machines at a Virginia co-lo center after we finish getting all the parts for Ivan Krstić's blackrock.

NB: This post has been sitting around in my drafts for a while, and I just got around to posting it now. We're still waiting on some last-minute parts before putting these servers into production.

Low-tech anti-surveillance tool for the OLPC XO-1

After reading several articles about the alleged spying that was enabled by a Pennsylvania school district via its one-to-one MacBook, and seeing discussion on a variety of mailing lists, I've decided to implement my own zero-cost, no-hassle solution to the problem for the OLPC XO-1's camera.

This should be able to be adopted in deployments everywhere, by anyone with a piece of paper, or anything else they can slide through the plastic faceplate.

Just say no to fancy addons and factory-added "shutters" or "covers", make your own!

NComputing and Sugar

Apologies for not posting recently, but I've been really busy with various events and tasks for the summer. I just got back from NECC09, where ISTE had been nice enough to give Sugar and other FLOSS projects their own presentation room, gratis.

While assisting with the various presentations at the Open Source Center and staffing the Sugar/OLPC booth, I ran into some of the folks from NComputing. Their corporation has some similiar goals with that of OLPC, as both involve low-cost computing for the third world and elsewhere. Providing multi-seat technology, which is similar to thin-clients without the lag and network overhead, they enable multiple displays and mice to function off a single computer. Since they support both Ubuntu and SuSE Linux with their (admittedly closed) hardware, I decided to investigate their technology as a means of enhancing deployment of Sugar.

The method to activate the NComputing software (requires registration to download) is not obvious; one must navigate to the console, select "Serial Numbers" from the side menu, and then right click the empty license list and choose "Manage". Many users would not be able to do so without the manual; maybe it would be easier to prompt for a license key in the debconf install process?

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test their software with Sugar; the most recent version of Ubuntu they support is 8.04, and I can't even insmod their kernel module on 9.04.

aside: meant to put this out an age ago, just got around to hitting "publish" today. (2009-08-16)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software