[3738] in Release_7.7_team
AMENDED - 11 February 2003 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Feb 13 21:33:08 2003
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 21:32:44 -0500
Message-Id: <200302140232.VAA31450@error-messages.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
Hi. Due to an error on my part, the status report I sent two days ago
was a little bit off. Here is an amended version. The changes are:
* The Differences document should have been PROGRESS, not DONE.
(Correspondingly, there's a goal for it for next month.)
* "Other Goals" should have included notes about outreach to
multi-partition Sun owners.
* "Key Learnings" should have been present with notes about the IBM
graphics card.
* The machine counts should have been present.
Sorry for the mixup.
---
Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Team
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 11 February 2003 (Amended 13 February 2003)
Submitted by: Greg Hudson
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
Accomplishments past period:
Last Month's goals:
ONGOING: Further testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.1.
PROGRESS: Work on Athena Solaris RPM stuff.
PROGRESS: Complete integration of GNOME 2 and Evolution upgrades.
PROGRESS: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock Red
Hat Linux".
DONE: Updated email documentation with Mozilla mail configuration.
DONE: Evaluate disconnected operation deployment and identify what still
needs to be done.
DONE: Deploy IAP patch release with local lockers framework, disconnected
operation framework, OpenAFS upgrade, Solaris security and kernel
fixes, and Evolution startup fix.
DONE: Put Mozilla 1.2.1 for Solaris, and Linux with MIT configuration
into the infoagents locker for testing. Add SGI version.
DONE: Codify X server understandings into plans for Athena release,
announced level of laptop functionality, and recommendations
to IBM.
Community Milestones Met:
DONE: Testing of Mozilla 1.2.1, and setting it as default.
DONE: Deploy IAP patch release.
Other Accomplishments:
* Integrated new versions of bash, OpenSSL, perl, gcc, and OpenSSH
for the next full release.
* Began outreach to owners of multi-partition Sun's to assess impact of:
1. Trying to eliminate all Suns with root partition smaller than 100Meg.
2. Trying to eliminate Suns with separate /, /usr, and /var partitions.
If #1 is done 67 systems are affected. The value would be more
data on local disk and faster Sun operation.
If #2 is done, an additional 127 systems are affected. The value
would be to eliminate the /srvd remote filesystem use, bring
everything local, simplify the install and update on Suns, and a
probably dramatic improvement in performance.
#1 is probably reachable by the end of the summer. #2 points up
servers, and probably will take longer.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Further testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.1.
OLD: Work on Athena Solaris RPM stuff.
OLD: Complete integration of GNOME 2 and Evolution upgrades.
OLD: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock Red
Hat Linux".
NEW: Develop fast DNS timeout for disconnected operation.
NEW: Develop friendly way to go on/off net or switch interfaces.
NEW: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
NEW: Investigate workaround for VMWare problem (see "Issues").
NEW: Integrate new version of Pine for next full release.
NEW: Integrate new version of openssh for next full release.
NEW: Make installs of SMP Linux machines work properly.
NEW: Develop IMAP-based "from" command to improve new message count at
login.
NEW: Integrate Mozilla into Athena source tree.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Update Linux installer to support multi-processor machines.
Issues:
VMWare does not get along with the latest Red Hat Linux kernels.
Although we don't support VMWare, some of our customers use it. We
advised users to delay taking the latest patch release if they use
VMWare. We recently learned of a possible workaround and are
investigating it.
The process of building Athena for Solaris now takes 21 hours on the
current build machine, due to the high volume of GNOME 2 source and a
newer, slower (but otherwise improved) gcc. Long build times slow
down integration work.
We don't seem to have thought through the process of creating a local
home directory for machines running disconnected. This will make it
difficult to write documentation.
Key learnings:
We did extensive testing of the Matrox G450DVI in the IBM Linux
systems comparing free and proprietary device driver, and various
versions of Red Hat and various releases and betas of XFree86. Our
findings are published at:
http://web.mit.edu/release/www/ibm-video.html
Those findings were forwared to our IBM salesman.
Subsequently XFree86 announced that Matrox users should adopt the
proprietary device driver. Since this is at odds with our findings
for the best configuration, we need to do some outreach to XFree86.
Additional comments:
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 still running 9.0 and prior will not report in this way.
January December Delta
737 linux 735 linux +2
64 sgi 65 sgi -1
829 sun4 791 sun +38 High. We've re-installed 54 this month.
Old method:
Summary:
1035 Solaris down 28
1233 Linux down 26
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.
Here are the number of reboots we saw:
Solaris:
Month: Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan
This: 847 825 753 772 467 746
Sum: 1066 1070 1067 1056 1035 1007
Linux:
Month: Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan
This: 658 647 599 527 374 461
Sum: 1160 1205 1232 1233 1219 1193
