[1623] in Release_7.7_team
Athena 8.2.17 and private workstations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Jan 29 21:26:07 1999
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 21:26:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-announce@MIT.EDU
This note is to address the concerns of private Sun workstation
administrators with regard to the 8.2.17 patch release, which
introduces 46 Sun patches. We haven't ever made so many changes to
Solaris in a patch release before, and the approach we took this time
has raised some serious concerns for private workstation
administrators who won't want to take the update immediately upon the
field release.
In response to these concerns, we have rescheduled the patch release
for the evening of Monday, February 8 and have taken a careful look at
the Sun patches to see what might break on a non-updated machine.
Most of the Sun patches introduce localized bug-fixes without creating
dependencies, but there are exceptions. We believe that any problems
people will experience on non-updated machines will be confined to the
following five sets of programs:
1. ld and elfdump
2. at, atrm, atq, and crontab
3. nismkdir, nistest, nis_cachemgr, nisinit, nisbackup,
nisrestore, and rpc.nisd (NIS+ programs)
4. mailstats (an auxiliary sendmail program)
5. The native lp and lpstat
(Note that cron jobs will continue to run just fine, and that Athena
printing functions, both client and server, will continue to work
properly.)
The first two categories (ld, elfdump, at*, and crontab) have known
dependencies on taking the update; on non-updated machines, they will
fail with shared library errors. We will make available a short
script which makes the minimal changes necessary to restore those
programs' functionality as an alternative to taking the update (the
script doesn't require a reboot or anything to take effect; it just
makes some small updates to /usr/lib). The third, fourth, and fifth
categories are programs which might have dependencies on the update,
but which we couldn't easily test to make sure.
If you rely on NIS+, the mailstats program, or the native print
spooling programs on a private Athena Sun workstation which is
inconvenient to update, please get in touch with us
(release-team@mit.edu) as soon as possible so that we can address
potential problems with those programs in more detail. As always,
other comments or questions can also go to release-team@mit.edu.
We apologize for the unusually high amount of disruption this patch
release may cause and for the "you must update" hard line taken in the
Sunday announcement with regard to the ld dependency.
-- Greg Hudson, for the Athena release team
