[3419] in Release_7.7_team
Official Announcement: The state of the Linux Athena installer.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Jul 30 18:33:43 2002
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: linux-help@mit.edu, cfyi@mit.edu, ops@mit.edu, hardserv@mit.edu
Cc: owls@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu, linux-dev@mit.edu
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Date: 30 Jul 2002 18:33:39 -0400
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Various people have come to me saying there was no official announcement
of the support status of the new and improved Athena installer.
This note serves as the official announcement:
The old IS Athena Linux installer, based on etherboot is officially
DISCOURAGED. It only worked for a small subset of hardware and set bits
in the EEPROM of those systems that proved toxic on 100Base-T networks,
or when the Windows Athena RIS was attempted. We plan to de-support
this installer and disable it soon.
The current and supported IS Athena Linux Installer is based on Red
Hat's installer, modified for the Athena environment. It has been the
preferred method of installation since May 31. It supports a wide variety
of hardware, not just the few systems officially certified as Athena Cluster
machines. It is VERY likely that hardware that will install with the stock
Red Hat installer, will work just fine the current and supported IS Athena
Linux installer.
On July 9, the installer was revised to remedy a problem with how the IBM
Ethernet NIC behaved on congested networks.
If you have an Athena Linux Install floppy older than July 9, 2002,
replace it with what is currently in the bootkit locker. The file
/mit/bootkit/rhlinux/INSTRUCTIONS will remind you how to do so.
With the advent of this new installer, it is also possible to use a CD
instead of a floppy to do the install. The file
/mit/bootkit/rhlinux/athena.iso is an ISO 9660 image that can be burned
onto CD. The SIPB-maintained cdrecord locker contains the relevant
tools, modules and instructions to do this on an Athena machine with a
CDRW drive. (All the black systems, Dell GX150 and IBM IntelliStation,
deployed to clusters have CDRW drives.)
The CD has the same bits as the floppy, and does the same thing, except that
the initial bootup is faster because bits get copied off a CD faster than off
a floppy.
The only reason why we do not tell people by default to use the CD
instead of the floppy is that we've encountered too many systems that
need their BIOS re-configured before they will boot off the CD.
Early in August, Andrew Boardman will be training help desk personnel
in using the Athena Linux installer.
If the installer does not work, even on unsupported hardware, people should
report the problem to bugs@mit.edu. No matter what the problem, we want
to hear about it. For unsupported hardware, our available time to figure out
what is wrong is limited, nay nearly nonexistant. Administering clue to
new users who make easily corrected errors on unsupported hardware will,
as usual, fall to the volunteers who take the time to help out. Since
the new installer asks many fewer questions, it is my hope that the
opportunities for mistakes are fewer.
-wdc
