[3169] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2002-02-27 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Mar 6 15:23:11 2002
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 15:23:08 -0500
Message-Id: <200203062023.PAA03710@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Attending: ghudson zacheiss tbelton wdc rbasch othomas aurora amb jweiss
1. Crash and burn
March 1 marks the beginning of the crash and burn phase of the
release. This is where the release engineer builds new system packs
and tests them in order to come up with a plausible alpha release.
Before crash and burn begins, we are supposed to have enough of an OS
update or install such that the release engineer can create a build
machine for the new operating system. Fortunately, we have that for
Red Hat 7.2 (it was easy).
We also have that for Solaris 9 beta, but we decided we will probably
not go with Solaris 9 for the Athena 9.2 release, since Solaris 9 will
probably not be out soon enough.
2. Netscape 6
We will probably have to apply some patches to the Solaris release
(and possibly install their gtk, but most likely not) in order to get
Netscape 6 working.
3. 3c509 auto-negotiation problem
For background, some of our Linux machines have poor network
performance because the driver fails to cause auto-negotiation of the
right speed.
Bill has a little frob which corrects the problem in user-space by
forcing a renegotiation; we will put it into the release as a hack,
since we don't like modifying the stock kernel if we don't have to.
4. Monthly status
We talked about items for the monthly status report; see release-77
[3164] for the resulting report.
5. Special Linux installs
ECE wants a way of customizing their Linux machines at install time.
We came up with a framework involving an undocumented installer option
(typing something like "special ece" at the custom install prompt)
which could be extended to other customers with similar requests.
6. Linux machines and NVidia cards
If you replace an ATI graphics card with an NVidia card in an Athena
machine (e.g. because the ATI card died), you need to modify the X
configuration. Andrew will modify fix-xconfig to make this change
when necessary.
7. CD writing
We have CD writers on some machines in the clusters. Because Linux is
insufficiently cool, they don't quite work out of the box; you have to
fiddle with kernel modules to write CDs. (See /mit/cdrecord/README.)
We might try to make this more sane.
