[3262] in Release_7.7_team
Minutes of 2002-05-01 release team meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed May 1 14:43:10 2002
Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 14:43:07 -0400
Message-Id: <200205011843.OAA01556@equal-rites.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Attending: ghudson zacheiss amb miki rbasch csnowden wdc jweiss
1. RIS/etherboot problem
The eeprom frobbing done by the etherboot installer causes RIS (used
by the Pismere installer) not to work, for most 3com cards. Machines
affected are:
- Athena GX1s, which will be desupported in a couple of months
- Athena GX150s, which should mostly be fixed by the release
- Other machines with 3com cards
Even after we deploy the new installer, old floppies may float around
and continue to break new machines.
Our plan:
- To avoid breaking new machines, we should add a code segment to
phase2, in the section which only runs for the etherboot install,
to restore the EEPROM values and reset the MII unit. Andrew will
take care of this.
- For existing machines, we can probably just point people at Bill,
who can provide a hackish DOS-floppy-based fix. The number of
cases involved is probably small enough for this to work.
2. Status report
We went over our monthly status; it will show up in separate mail.
3. Disconnected operation
We discussed Bill's embryonic white paper on disconnected operation,
particularly areas where the Athena centralized model doesn't mesh
with the idea of a machine which might not be on the network at any
given time. Some areas of conflict are:
- Some of our services (AFS, Hesiod and DNS) time out slowly instead
of failing immedately when a machine is pulled off the net. In
some cases fixing these problems could be very difficult.
- We have a centralized homedir model, which is not compatible with
being off the net some of the time.
- Software in lockers is also not available when people are off the
net; some software such as OpenOffice would be particularly
useful.
- Automatic updates aren't necessarily a bright idea when a machine
might be pulled off the net in the middle of an update. But
without automatic updates, machines will be less likely to get
security fixes.
The conclusion was that an Athena product which works well with
disconnect operation would probably have to be a new product with
different expectations, and would probably require significant
manpower.
