Re: [olpc-software] Servers

[Ivan Krstic <krstic fas harvard edu>]

Dean Johnson wrote:
> On a purely economic basis, for the target price of a single OLPC, you 
> can send two access points at retail price. [...] Plus, I don't want 
> to be the one ripping an OLPC out of a kids hands for reprovisioning.

I misunderstood you; I took you to mean you'd use a WRT54g to be an AP, 
and still use a laptop for the school server. It seems like you want to 
do away with the "laptop as server" concept entirely, and I'm not sure 
how that would work. How do you see an AP providing enough CPU power to 
act as a general server (and interfacing with external storage), unless 
we're talking custom AP hardware or high-end APs?

A 366Mhz laptop can, by contrast, serve a small school just fine as an 
AP and general server. Big schools, according to thinking on this list, 
will get proper server hardware. So the non-obvious problem appears to 
be mid-size schools; too big for a laptop server, but too small to 
justify proper iron.

I need to think some more about my preferred solution, but as a mesh 
guy, I'd instinctively place my bet on the mesh cloud and trying to push 
processing to the edges, rather than figuring out how to make the square 
problem fit in a round centralized hole. It's possible centralization is 
the way to go, but I'm pretty far from being convinced yet.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic fas harvard edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D