[2485] in Release_7.7_team
Fwd: Follow up
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Nov 10 22:11:06 2000
Message-ID: <0u3=Wzhz0001N8A91V@mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 03:10:55 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: owls@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
Susan Green, our Dell sales representative, put me in touch with Jim
Garrett who is a Director of product development at Dell. I gave him an
overview of how Athena is "unique", and he is interested in working
together.
The conference call he offers is an interesting opportunity. I think it
would be a good chance to help Dell understand us better, and maybe get
our Athena install, update, maintenance and scale-up principles out into
the worlld.
Who would like to participate? I think zacheiss, or ghudson, or both
might be good to have on board so that we can really talk turkey with
regards to that PXD thing.
Recommendations?
Oliver: add this to the Owls agenda please.
(Also add dicussion about outreach to RedHat as well)
-wdc
---------- Forwarded message begins here ----------
From: <Jim_Garrett@Dell.com>
To: wdc@MIT.EDU
Cc: Susan_Green@Dell.com
Subject: Follow up
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 09:42:16 -0600
Bill,
Thanks for the direction. I'd like to setup a conference call sometime
early next week if we can. I should have the configuration information for
you before the call so you'll have a chance to look it over. I think we
might want to break the call into two parts. First to answer any questions
you have about the suggested configuration. The second part of the
conference call is to get MIT in touch with a couple of the development team
members working on Linux. I'd like them to hear some about Athena - I'll
send them a condensed version of some of your web material so they'll have a
rudimentary understanding of what MIT is doing.
I'd like for us all to see if there's something we can find that would
provide an engineering engagement opportunity. The one that seems to "stick
out" to me is perhaps the installation activity. The PXE technology I
eluded to in previous messages is typically used in a "pull method" and
would allow you to eliminate the boot floppy for your client base (at least
GX1, GX110 & GX150s). This is an industry standard interface and our
competitors all use the same feature so the work is applicable for "the
industry". There are several things you can enable using this feature - it
might be interesting to brainstorm to see what we can come up with. There
are also some new technologies on the horizon that we might be able to
jointly develop for Linux. For example, there are additional security
features in a new technology called Boot Integrity Services (BIS) for pre-OS
load server and client authentication. If you're interested see
http://developer.intel.com/design/security/bis/bis.htm - but this is just an
example of something we jointly might find beneficial.
If you agree that this would be a good thing then I'll try and see when we
can get some of the key people here lined up. I expect to have some of the
key Dell Linux engineering team on the call. I'll also attempt to pull in
an engineer or two from our Systems Management team (both servers and
clients).
JEG
Director, Product Development
Dell RPG, Client Architecture & Technology
(512) 728-3397
email: jim_garrett@dell.com
http://www.dell.com ; http://www.gigabuys.com
