[3786] in Release_7.7_team
2 April 2003 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Apr 2 13:08:52 2003
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 13:08:53 -0500
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
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Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Team
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 2 April 2003
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
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.
NEW: Prepare Alpha release of Athena 9.2.
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".
OLD: Develop fast DNS timeout for disconnected operation.
OLD: Develop friendly way to go on/off net or switch interfaces.
OLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
OLD: Investigate workaround for VMWare problem (see "Issues").
OLD: Make installs of SMP Linux machines work properly.
OLD: Develop IMAP-based "from" command to improve new message count at
login.
OLD: Integrate Mozilla into Athena source tree.
Community Milestone Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Integreated new version tetex into release
* Security patch release.
* Updated Private Workstation Owners Guide
* Integrated newer version of Solaris 9 (12/02) into the release.
* Progress on writing Athena SpamScreen documentation.
* New kerberos 5 aklog integrated into release.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Further testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.1.
NEW: Prepare Alpha release of Athena 9.2.
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".
OLD: Develop fast DNS timeout for disconnected operation.
OLD: Develop friendly way to go on/off net or switch interfaces.
OLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
OLD: Investigate workaround for VMWare problem (see "Issues").
OLD: Make installs of SMP Linux machines work properly.
OLD: Develop IMAP-based "from" command to improve new message count at
login.
OLD: Integrate Mozilla into Athena source tree.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Update Linux installer to support multi-processor machines.
Issues:
The vast majority of our goals last month were delayed or postponed
because our resources were 100% consumed doing required integration work
of new software versions of stuff like GNOME into the release. This
means that those listed goals may not get done next month either,
because the release integration work is our highest priority.
Key learnings:
Additional comments:
We now have a plan for addressing Solaris wash time:
1. Investigate opportunities with end of year money to buy
significantly
faster build machines. (Not likely) Note that we get 80% of the
benefit if
we replace one of the two build hosts.
2. If a new, faster, member of the inexpensive Solaris server line
becomes
available this fiscal year, buy it.
3. Make the wash smarter.
Athena Monthly machine counts:
Summary: About the same as last month.
New method: Have systems get themselves a unique id every time they
install, and report every day they are up. This over-counts systems
installed multiple times, and under-counts systems that predate Athena
9.1.
March February Delta
744 linux 766 linux -22
65 sgi 65 sgi 0
799 sun4 821 sun4 -22
Old method: Count unique host names seen rebooting. To remedy
under-count systems that don't reboot, we sum over a six months. That
over-counts systems that were re-purposed to non-athena use.
Summary:
914 Solaris down 44
1064 Linux down 73
Eventually the two counts should converge on the same value, but it's
still a noisy count with 10-20% error.
Here are the number of reboots we saw:
Solaris:
Month: Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
This: 753 772 467 746 444 751
Sum: 1067 1056 1035 1007 958 914
Linux:
Month: Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar
This: 647 599 527 374 461 410 459
Sum: 1205 1232 1233 1219 1193 1137 1064
