[3479] in Release_7.7_team
11 September 2002 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Sep 11 18:26:57 2002
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu, delivery@mit.edu
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Date: 11 Sep 2002 18:26:52 -0400
Message-Id: <1031783212.31826.127.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
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Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Team
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 11 September 2002
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
Long report covering nearly a month and a half of furious activity
relating to getting ready for the start of class.
Accomplishments past period:
Last Month's goals:
CHANGED: Deploy usable test version of Netscape 6.2.x for Linux and Sun
in infoagents locker. (URGENT) (Note: not caching in home dir is a vital
requirement to meet)
CHANGED: Begin testing of Netscape 6.2.x
DELAYED: Work on prototype for Athena disconnected operation.
DELAYED: Get nautilus working for concurrent login sessions.
PROGRESS: Work on Athena Solaris RPM stuff.
PROGRESS: Work with IBM on de-kludging video
DONE: Craft, and test DOS floppy stand-alone remedy to etherboot
problem.
DONE: Train Help Desk in the Athena Linux installer.
DONE: More testing and bug fixing for Athena 9.1
DONE: Test laptop systems to see if they work with Athena Linux
install. (Purpose of this work is: graceful dual boot install)
Community Milestone Met:
9.1.14 Athena patch release with performance enhancements.
Other Accomplishments:
* Mozilla:
After spending a LONG time struggling, it was determined that Netscape 6
could not be taught how to cache elsewhere. This show-stopper drove a
fast-track develop, configure and deploy of Mozilla 1.0. Users who type
'netscape' will get a pop-up that says that we could not get Netscape 6
to work, and that mozilla is the preferred browser. (The user will also
get the option of running Netscape 4.78, without seeing the pop-up.)
The Athena tools that pop up web pages have been reconfigured to use
mozilla instead. With the upcoming patch release, the Netsape icon will
be replaced with the Mozilla icon (with a caption "WWW" to alert people
that this is the browser button.) Most importantly, the upcoming patch
release will support the nightly copy mozilla local in addition to
netscape. This way users will get high performance with the new
browser, and with the old browser.
* Laid groundwork for patch release to bring 2 browsers local.
* Security patch release for Solaris resolver library vulnerability.
* collaborated with OpenAFS developers on various issues.
* Docs updated: Release Notes, Working on Athena, Emacs, Discuss,
Zephyr.
* Produced a pretty Athena install CD and gave a pile of them to the
help desk for distribution, and to OLC and the SIPB for use.
* Published a draft web page documenting lore of Linux Athena
installs on various of the IS recommended laptops.
* Improvements to Athena installer that fix long-standing Red Hat
Xconfigurator bugs. Now the Athena installer does BETTER than RedHat
for configuring X on a diversity of systems because RedHat, rather than
taking our fixes, insists that Xconfigurator is being replaced in the
future.
Next Month's Goals:
OLD: Work on prototype for Athena disconnected operation.
OLD: Get nautilus working for concurrent login sessions.
OLD: Work on Athena Solaris RPM stuff.
OLD: Work with IBM on de-kludging video
NEW: Further testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.1 with particular
attention to mozilla.
NEW: Deploy patch release with mozilla and Pilot sync.
NEW: Updated email documentation with Mozilla mail configuration.
NEW: Further updates to Working on Athena doc.
NEW: Work on getting Athena installer graceful for auto-partion dual
boot on laptops.
Next Community Milestone:
Patch release with Mozilla as the "browser button", and with local
copying. Patch release will also contain Pilot sync on Linux (of value
to PDA users.)
Issues:
With the new method of counting systems, reinstalled machines will be
counted as a new machine for that month. This non-ideality will not be
fixed. (CLOSED -- Will not fix.)
The "DynRoot" AFS fix, though it improves performance with file
browsers makes timeouts take longer if you have multiple AFS cells in
your search path, and you're disconnected. For example: Software in the
SIPB Cell in addition to regular Athena cell software is common. AFS,
instead of timing out once for all of AFS, will time out on each cell.
We discussed ideas for what to suggest to the Open AFS developers as a
remedy. Bottom line: This will not be fixed until some significant
development is done by the OpenAFS developers. Most users won't be
badly affected by this since most users only have one or two cells in
their search path. (CLOSED -- Vendor wait.)
The IBM Flat panel does not work in Digital mode. This is unfortunate
in that the Digital mode is supposed to be cleaner. But we can
certainly live with this state of affairs. We're focusing on other
work. (CLOSED -- too low priority.)
Key learnings:
Sometimes uncertainty is resolved clearly but not soon enough.
Team dynamics:
Todd did a ton of work, learned a lot about work and decision making
processes in IS and at MIT. He's increased his visibility and
credibility greatly in his handling of the Netscape/Mozilla work.
Additional comments:
I think that if I had, a month earlier said, "Netscape 6 is going round
and round in a cycle of Roadblock/Delay/Resume over several months"
perhaps we would have started working on Mozilla in time to have it
tested and installed as the default before the first day of classes. We
would not have had the clear answer "can't fix the cache -- bona fide
show stopper", and so we would have been uncomfortable, but we would
have been on time for our customers.
Athena Monthly machine counts:
New method: Have systems get themselves a unique id every time they
install, and report every day they are up. This is new with Athena
9.1. Systems that did not update will not report in this way.
August July Delta
639 linux 427 linux +212 (high. Lots of install testing)
74 sgi 96 sgi - 22 (appropriate. Cluster renewal.)
842 sun4 769 sun4 + 73 (probably accurate.)
Old method:
Summary:
1062 Solaris down 47
1073 Linux up 89
How we do it: Every time an Athena system reboots, the event is logged
centrally. We count the unique host names over a period of months.
This is an imperfect count, but it's the best guess we currently have.
Next month we will switch to Athena systems explicitly syslogging their
existance, but that will not count systems that fail to update.)
Here are the number of reboots we saw:
Solaris:
Month: Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
This: 899 535 857 487 821 847
Sum: 1043 1068 1094 1109 1062 1066
Linux:
Month: Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
This: 636 542 437 524 588 658
Sum: 872 916 960 984 1073 1160
