[2040] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Linux/Athena roll out plan
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Wed Jan 12 01:14:39 2000
Message-Id: <200001120614.BAA18211@speaker-for-the-dead.mit.edu>
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
cc: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>, BSG@MIT.EDU, Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>,
rferrara@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "11 Jan 2000 23:32:50 EST."
<u1hr9fnx631.fsf@pusey.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 01:14:27 -0500
> It would help immeasurably if they could be written down. There's a
Here's a quick list:
Install version flexability: Occasionally it is useful to be able to
install older versions of Athena. The solaris install does this by
asking what verson to install. The DEC install asked you for a locker
or AFS path to install from. I consider either of these to be
acceptable. You can probably come up with some other approaches that
I'd consider fine too.
Install disk flexibility: If there is more than one disk in the
system, I should have the option of which one I want to install onto.
Bonus points will be granted for allowing the install to span disks,
but this feature has never existed and is not a requirement.
Disk partitioning flexibility: I should be able to specify the
partitioning, if I want a bigger AFS cache or /var or something. We
don't need to be able to specify what partition goes on which disk
slice, just the sizes of the slices.
In order to meet cluster's requirement of as few questions as
possible, the sun install asks these questions only if you answer yes
to "custom install".
Ops also uses the install in single user mode as a recovery system.
This doesn't have to be part of the athena install, especially if
there are rescue disks that are available. However, there should be
some rescue mechanism for athena machines.
In the desirement category, I'd like to see the following message
preserved as part of the athena install process:
echo " DESTROYS"
echo "THIS PROCEDURE DESTROYS THE CONTENTS OF THE HARD DISK."
echo " DESTROYS"
(This is only partially a joke. The particular message dates back to
the vax and rt installs, and I really like the "destroys destroys
destroys" part. On the more serious side, having a warning before
nuking the disk is a good thing.
Hopefully these aren't too onerous to add to the requirement list.
Jonathon
