Monthly Archives: March 2012

When I first read the specs on wimax, I thought it would revolutionize internet connectivity in the developing world.  It should do the same in the US but the current cell phone companies have a vested interest in slow evolution. … Continue reading →

Two weeks ago, I was promoting the use of deep cycle batteries, so that School Servers could run 24 hours a day.  As I’ve thought more about living with rolling load shedding, and expensive power, I realized that I needed … Continue reading →

Today was really fun. Ferdie, the local technical lead, had observed that registration of XO’s succeeded at two schools and failed at two other schools. He also observed that “idmgr list-registration” displayed the serial numbers of XO’s that had never … Continue reading →

The diagnostic suggestions for troubleshooting ejabberd have been exhausted, but still no joy.  The symptom is that running olpc-netstatus shows that the XO is doing presence via salut.  The strange thing is that ejabberd appears to have seen users, that … Continue reading →

tick list the laptop at LIS should have a new battery, or run without an internal battery because after a certain degree of degradation it becomes a load on the power supply and prevents proper function. Teachers need a gui … Continue reading →

There is a trend towards letting professional system administrators do their work on large server farms, and letting mere mortals benefit from their work by connecting to these “Cloud servers” via our high bandwith connections. Given the difficulty of setting … Continue reading →

Successes at LIS: Lloyd and I successfully configured the laptop that Mitch had loaded with the XS-AU 0.7 back in July 2011. We were able to register XO’s on the school server. XO’s could share the internet connection by way … Continue reading →

Quick summary: Commands: ifconfig — use this to see which interfaces are recognized, and whether they have correct ip addresses, error packets “ip addr” — gives a shortened form of ifconfig “netstat -nr” — to see if there is a … Continue reading →

I experienced some success today putting together a circuit to amplify the small voltage developed across a heavy duty shunt resistor that can be attached to a storage battery. It worked on the third try.  The first time, I decided … Continue reading →