The central system is made up of two Linux severs running Debian Sarge, located in Tenerife and Gran Canaria. They are configured as 4 virtual machines running under Xen, with each one running the following associated services:

• System for updating the central repository
• Error reporting system
• Backup system
• File server

These servers are set up to take over the services that depend on the other machine in case of failure. In addition, they have enough capacity to run other services in the future.

System for updating the central repository

An installed IT system becomes obsolete over time. The applications, configurations, the system's programs, appearance etc may need to be changed and that may entail updating or replacing them. To meet this need, we have designed a distributed update system with suitable characteristics to allow the equipment to be maintained in fully up to date operational state.

The update system is based on Debian APT, holding a subset of packages from Kubuntu Dapper and some of own ones, with the repository maintained on our central server. This system is used by all of the school servers in each center, since it can distribute the load and will make the updates faster. The distribution of contents and updates is as follows:

1. Updates of existing packages are obtained, or new packages created.
2. They are obtained from the Canonical (ie Kubuntu) repositories that includes packages obtained from different sources, and downloaded to the central server.
3. An automatic process copies the updates to the school servers.
4. Every day the clients query their school server for possible updates.
5. If there are any updates, they are downloaded and installed, automatically maintaining the machine on a daily basis.

Failure Notification System

Each failure that the users report must be investigated in a timely manner, by the technicians in charge of maintenance. To make this possible a sufficiently powerful tool is needed to manage the work.

The Incident Request Tracker system allows the management of incidents through their complete life cycle. Each email sent by the failure notification application automatically creates a new incident report on the system. The can be consulted by the technicians along with all the documentation for the package in the distribution. Additionally, the system can be queried by users via email, and the incident request can also be reassigned to a specific technician via email.

The system has collaboration features to facilitate the cooperation between the technicians. For example specialized work groups for specific subjects can be created, each one of which is directed by a coordinator who is in charge of assigning the incidents to his technicians. Thanks to this, along with a complete and accurate state diagram tracking the incident's progress, the incidents can be changed from a group to another one, under the control of the coordinators, until they are solved.

It is possible that the solution to some of the detected problems can't be handled by the maintenance technicians, but might depend on the developers of some other Free Software project. For that reason the system allows for the interconnection to other systems that handle incident reports. Thus, using the same interface the technicians can send failure reports to the developers and maintainers of the affected applications. This works in a transparent manner and allow the progress of the incident resolution in the other systems to be kept perfectly in step with ours.

Backup System

This system will enable copies of all the packages and configurations of mEDUXa to be made, so that they can be recovered with ease in case of the failure of some element of the project.

Contents

For content publication, the Mediawiki tool (www.mediawiki.org) has been chosen. One is a collaborative tool (called Eduwiki) that is very popular. The content created will have free license (following the established directive for all the project). Thus it will be available not only from the Canary Islands Government network, but throughout Internet. Using this tool, it will be possible to create a user community within mEDUXa, and it will facilitate collaboration with other similar projects like Linux, Skolelinux, Bardinux, Edubuntu, Guadalinex, etc.

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