Tanzania has exposed me to very many new and interesting things, such as kiti moto and dala dala, and not to forget one of the most delicious part of Tanzania, Ndovu. Thanks for Marcus for introducing these things for me at Dar es Salaam and Iringa!
One of the most interesting thing has been Tumaini University’s OLPC (Once Laptop Per Child) project in the local Ukombozi primary school. Marcus and Carolina are going to run a workshop on digital storytelling there next week, and today we went to prepare the technical bits of the project. My part was to configure the XO School Server (XS) to work as a resource centre and gateway to Internet for the XO laptops.
Configuring the server with Tumaini IT students at Ukombozi primary school
The server is based on Fedora with the necessary additions for using and sharing resources in the mesh-up network of XO laptops. The server was pre-configured almost completely, but wireless access point, school’s PPoE-based Internet connection, and server’s iptables-based firewall gave a bit of a headache for few hours. It seemed for me that if the Internet connection was a straight to Ethernet port as usually nowadays, the whole thing would have been just plug-and-play (after proper configuration for the access point). After all, everything seemed to be up and running even with the PPoE connection, and hopefully things will work also on the next week when the workshop starts.