[IAEP] Live CD collaboration problem

[Bert Freudenberg]

Am 25.08.2008 um 09:37 schrieb Morgan Collett:

> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 06:34, Joel Stanley
> <joel.stanley at adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
>> Hello All,
>>
>> Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> However, Sugar's collaboration software layer is not being detected
>>> Any suggestions on how to fix this problem?
>>
>> With some time Bill said he might be able to organise a local school
>> server, or set things up so that the students have access to external
>> jabber servers, but I thought that using the adhoc features of  
>> Sugar's
>> collaboration would be an easier solution.
>
> Yes, we should be able to get that working.
>
>> My understanding of the sugar presence stuff is limited, so forgive  
>> me
>> if I'm talking nonsense.  The machines receive an IP from the school
>> DHCP server.  We want to force the presence service to use salut
>> instead of looking for the unreachable jabber server.  Can we hack
>> this into presenceservice.py[1]?  I also saw the 169.254 hardcoded
>> into linklocal_plugin.py[2], is this relevant?
>
> Link local presence should "just work", but I've never used the  
> LiveCD images.
>
> Presence Service will automatically start salut / linklocal on
> startup, while it starts looking for a Jabber server. If it fails to
> connect to a Jabber server for whatever reason (server non-existant,
> down or unreachable) it will remain on salut.
>
> (The only exception to this is if it has an IP address on the msh0
> interface (XO mesh) which is not 169.254.x.x, then it is assumed that
> we are on a mesh network with a school server - then it disables salut
> for 2 minutes to try and avoid saturating the mesh network with salut
> traffic while looking for the school server's jabber server.)


There is another gotcha - if it connects successfully to a Jabber  
server that is in "group mode" then it will not see any other XOs  
because each XO is put into its own group (we need Gadget support to  
properly create groups, as I learned on IRC the other day). That  
happens currently on the olpc.collabora.co.uk server, which many  
developers might still have set as default (like I had on my XOs).

The simplest thing to force using the local network without server is  
setting a non-existent server name.

- Bert -