Hello world! from Bhagmalpur… part-1

This is a long long overdue post about the trip made by Kartik Perisetla and your’s truly to Bhagmalpur in an effort to install a new school server in the village.

To give you a background, the XSCE or the School Server Community Edition project has been gathering momentum over the past few months, and it has gotten to a point where pilots in remote places are conceivable. So, as a part of my summer internship, Dr. Verma graciously agreed to let us do a pilot of the server in the village (heck, I’d still have gone there if it wasn’t part of the internship).

Anyway, I roped in Kartik, who has been very interested to contribute to OLPC efforts in India, and both of us decided to head to the village around the last week of May (yes, that’s how long overdue this post it :-P). This plan took shape just before one of the periodic XSCE community sprints (this one was held at Adam’s parents’ home outside of Toronto). Working with Santiago Collazo (aklis) and Nitika Mangal from Activity Central we setup a roadmap for developing and testing the server before the actual trip to the village happened. We based our platform on the under-development 0.3 version of the XSCE and went about making sure that everything worked well out of the box and reliably so. After many conversations with Dr. Verma, we created an identical testing setup to the one which was in the Village.

May 22 came, and it was time to make it all happen in the real world. After surviving the Indian Railway’s ticket booking website and the actual train-journey itself, we made it to the village the following morning. Dr. Upendra Verma (Sameer’s uncle) was there to receive us and their son Utkarsh (traveling from Banaras). We knew the weather was going to be hot, but it was quite a bit more humid than we had expected. To top it off, there was no power in a major part of the village (including Upendra-ji’s house) for the last month or so, because a local transformer had burnt out and Indian bureaucracy was taking it’s usual ‘forever’ to fix it. Thankfully, sweet cold water from a hand pump in Upendra-ji’s house brought much needed respite!

After exchanging pleasantries, we soon got down to business and went about installing the new XO-1.75 based server replacing the old fit-PC based one. This was the most critical part of our trip and Upendra-ji turned on the diesel-powered generator so we could carry on with our work. We double and triple checked everything since if anything went wrong with the installation, the whole trip would be in vain. Also, we were facing problems getting the 3G modem↔TP-Link setup working, but thanks to Utkarsh’s smart thinking we got past that hurdle. The rest of the server installation went very smoothly. I can’t thank Santi and Nitika enough for their work in making sure we got past all the problems in our testing environment so we didn’t have to face any while in the village.

Soon, we were online, and sure enough, the server “called-home” to Dr. Verma’s openVPN server in SF. A server’s way of saying “Hello world!”

Liftoff! Chatting with @m_anish in #Bhagmalpur over the newly installed #OLPC XSCE school server, running on XO 1.75 pic.twitter.com/ZcvKaUIyA4

— Sameer Verma (@sameerverma) May 23, 2013

Following this eureka moment, we transferred all the 25 GB or so of content (ebooks, music, ted-talks and more…) into a 64GB pen-drive plugged into the XO-1.75 laptop. Then we placed the laptop neatly inside a briefcase along with all the other hardware. Working through the night, we installed software updates on all the available XO laptops (+ the five I took along with me, thanks to Arjun Gupta). Next, we registered them to the school server, so they could start sending journal backups. Another important part of the XSCE is statistics collection, where software running on the laptops records anonymous usage statistics and synchronizes them with the server. This data can then be researched to make useful analyses about usage patterns, software defects, and so on. 

After we were done with most of our tasks on Day-1 itself (phew!), we took a stroll through the village, this time during the night. My trusty sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens was a wonderful companion and took some great pictures, which can be seen here. While we were walking back to Upendra-ji’s home, we saw some lights blinking on their rooftop. He explained to me that those were the LED’s on the Wireless Access Point connected to the server. He told me a little story that when it was initially installed, the villagers were a little afraid of the strange blinking night-lights, and thought that it was some kind of a time bomb. Well, that time-bomb has now exploded! When they see those strange blinking lights again, they’ll know that internet is in the air, with all it’s wonders and wonderful content cached locally for their learning and joy. Talk about a shift in perspective!

School Server in a briefcase!

Updating the software on the XO laptops.

Look at the top left corner of this photograph. Those LED’s blinking on the rooftop indicate that wireless access is present, and the server is powered on.

The following morning, we gathered the kids from the village so they could get their first taste of the internet and the new server. It was interesting to see some of them requiring a slight bit of hand-holding while others taking to it like a duck to water. Mostly, we left them alone to figure it out and learn from one another. An interesting fact: we had to buy a new, much bigger data plan just after a couple of hours. An interesting trend that started to emerge was kids downloading local content (already present on the server), and researching bits of it on the internet. Before all of this happened, though, we had to address concerns of their parents about being exposed to malicious content, so we had already setup dansguardian.

Note: The server has been online for some two months now, and there will be another blog post deeply analyzing the usage and the benefits it has brought to children’s learning and the village in general.

Stay tuned for part-2 of this post and other updates from the village!