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Dogfood time - Migrating this forum to an OLPC!
vanderaj - January 31st, 2010 at 12:53 PM

Hi there,

Over the last few weeks, I've been working on getting the fundamentals of GaiaBB running with PDO. That effort is not yet ready, and may not be for a while. So to keep things moving, I will be moving this forum to run on one of the OLPCs kindly donated by the OLPC Project.

To use all three OLPCs properly, I will initially use them like this:

  • Establish a VPN and WAF solution for all of the devices. I will have access to them directly so I can security test them, but whilst there's still a possibility of XSS and SQL injection in the code, I want to stop just random attackers from taking the OLPCs down
  • Establish a completely separate network with firewall rules for the OLPCs. Currently the OLPCs are on my "guest" Airport Express network, which has outbound but no inbound network access. This will need to change. I have a spare wireless AP, and will use that to create a Lab network and put the OLPCs on that. From there, I will enable bi-directional Internet access on a white list only policy.
  • dev.gaiabb.com - I will automate the process of installing a new dev version from SVN every time there's a check in. Automated SimpleUnit tests will appear as a link in the header. dev will have its own database so I can re-install it automatically every time there's a new check in.
  • stage.gaiabb.com which will run the most stable version of SVN HEAD. Staging will use the production database hosted on http://www.gaiabb.com.  All automated tests must pass for a promotion from dev to staging.
  • http://www.gaiabb.com  - once I'm fairly happy with the latest version of stage, I will promote stage to production manually. To avoid this being a time drain, I will do this only about once per month.

    Once running this forum on an OLPC, you'll see how usable the GaiaBB platform is on the real version 1 hardware, which is vital as without that proof, there's little reason to continue the project.

    There's ample scope to improve the performance of GaiaBB - through the use of record level caching via APC in particular will help tremendously. This will come in time.

    Once everything is in place, I'll let everyone know how things are going! Besides a bit of extra latency (300 ms as I'm in a regional Australian town), there should be no noticeable difference in the forum's operation.

    thanks,
    Andrew