[Sugar-devel] A small server-based setup

[Simon Schampijer]

Hi,

I have a school with a few machines on which, of course, I want to run 
Sugar. The clients should be straight forward what I do not have much 
knowledge about is the server, maybe someone can comment.

* Clients:
As the learners are familiar with Ubuntu already, I will go for Sugar on 
Ubuntu. Thanks to Aleksey, David and friends there is a solution for 
Sugar on Ubuntu [1].

* Server:
** Needs:
The server should provide facilities for user authentication and the 
storage of user data. The adding/removing and editing of users should be 
doable by someone from the school staff. Highest priority is stability. 
There must be an easy way to turn the server on/off since it does not 
need to be up during the night.

A nice thing to have would be to start/stop internet connectivity by a 
software switch and to have a graphical way to see how long a person was 
logged in (for example during a week).

** Current approach:
So far, I setup a Fedora 11 server with openldap for authentication and 
NFS to manage the data storage.
I failed so far in stability, since the LDAP database was corrupted two 
times which ended in a non working environment. The logging in from the 
users is slow when you do it the first time from a client (might be due 
to a handshake or similar). The administration of the users is not as 
easy. I generated the users data by hand and added it to the LDAP 
database. I configured the power switch to shutdown when pressing which 
works fine. The clients are fat clients as the server is not powerful 
enough.

The current approach was ok for a first test, but I would like to do the 
next step and setup something more solid with better ways to 
administrate. I can't imagine that there isn't something already 
preconfigured for my use case. Anyone does have experience in that 
regard, links etc?

Thanks,
    Simon

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Community/Distributions/Ubuntu