[3832] in Release_7.7_team
7 May 2003 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Wed May 7 13:49:32 2003
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:49:29 -0400
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Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Team
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 7 May 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.
DONE: Prepare Alpha release of Athena 9.2.
DONE: Complete integration of GNOME 2 and Evolution upgrades.
DELAYED: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock
Red
Hat Linux".
DELAYED: Develop fast DNS timeout for disconnected operation.
DELAYED: Develop friendly way to go on/off net or switch interfaces.
PROGRESS: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
DELAYED: Investigate workaround for VMWare problem.
DONE: Develop IMAP-based "from" command to improve new message count at
login.
Community Milestone Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Security patch release for Solaris to remedy xdr vulnerability and on
Linux to remedy a bunch of local root exploits, and a tcpdmp
vulnerability.
* Received and deployed fast build machine. (Also crafted changes to
build process to better exploit a multi-processor.)
* Made changes to Athena installer to handle unusual system disk
hardware configurations.
* Imported new version of sendmail that will help prepare for
compliance with upcoming authenticated SMTP standard being adopted by
Network Operations.
* Produced an article for the IS insider on Athena Linux.
* Produced a status report slide for IT-Partners on Athena, non-Athena,
and Laptoip Linux.
* Significant progress in preparing the Athena Beta release.
Next month's goals:
CHANGED: Bug fixing of Athena 9.1 if necessary. Focus shifts to Athena
9.2.
NEW: Deploy Beta release of Athena 9.2.
NEW: Prepare Early release of Athena 9.2
NEW: Evaluate laptop hardware for Athena recommendations.
NEW: Evaluate desktop hardware for Athena recommendations if any
arrives from IBM or HP.
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.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena Beta release targeted for May 15.
Issues:
We put significant effort into fixing bugs only seen when software is
deployed in a large scale, and/or multi-platform environment:
1. The new GNOME terminal program had a serious performance problem on
Solaris that
we formulated a fix for.
2. A bug in RPM was causing dependency problems that would have hurt a
lot if we had not
fixed it during Alpha.
3. Red Hat introduced a C library API difference that we had to
discover, and work around
to keep our third party software working.
4. Java plugin incompatibilities forced us to obtain a different,
third-party Java plugin for
Linux, and to change how we compile Mozilla Solaris.
Key learnings:
Additional comments:
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.
April March February Delta
753 linux 744 linux 766 linux +9
64 sgi 65 sgi 65 sgi -1
824 sun4 799 sun4 821 sun4 +25
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:
909 Solaris down 5
1000 Linux down 64
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 Apr
This: 753 772 467 746 444 751 495
Sum: 1067 1056 1035 1007 958 914 909
Linux:
Month: Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr
This: 599 527 374 461 410 459 439
Sum: 1232 1233 1219 1193 1137 1064 1000
