[40] in Release_7.7_team
AIX 3.2.5
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Basch)
Fri Mar 18 19:46:11 1994
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 1994 19:45:59 -0500
To: ppt@MIT.EDU, release-77@MIT.EDU
From: "Richard Basch" <basch@MIT.EDU>
There are some problems with hardware support with the current release
of AIX (3.2.3). Currently, we cannot support the new video cards (Gt1x)
that are now being distributed with the model 220. The old Gt1 adapter
is no longer being manufactured, and all new machines come with the Gt1x
adapter. This adapter requires that the operating system level be at
3.2.4 or higher. Unfortunately, we do not have an update strategy for
being able to update the operating system itself on the RISC/6000.
The first issue is being able to create new 3.2.5 install media and
install images, and being able to layer Athena on top of that. This has
to happen regardless of what other things we do to update the existing
machines. The new machines require this.
The alternatives we have to support the other machines are:
1. Leave the operating system on the existing clients untouched, but
continue to update our software. Since the operating system is fully
contained on the local hard disk, this is not a problem. There are no
weird interactions with our software between AIX 3.2.3 and AIX 3.2.5.
(Even though I do not have a fully functional installation, my machine
is running AIX 3.2.5, with no problems.)
2. Have the public machines automatically re-install themselves during
the update procedure... this will require some development so that the
client contacts the install server to make sure it is not in the process
of updating more than a couple other machines, and then setting up a
special boot logical volume that is network aware and loads the new
software from the server. This means that the update procedure should
take about 45 minutes per machine, but the machines would only be doing
this when they are idle. Timeframe: by the end of the summer, probably.
3. Come up with some as-yet-unknown way of being able to update the
operating system with some method like track or synctree, and mucking
with the ODM. Timeframe: rat hole alert (Mark Virtue and I spent a
couple of weeks once and made no progress...) Likelihood of succeeding
is close to zero, and certainly more than a month of full-time effort.
Impact for #1:
The time it will take to implement solution #1 is required as the basis
for all the solutions (so the others will be presented as additional
time to this solution). This one will take about 1.5 weeks.
For user support, there should not be much difference between AIX 3.2.3
and AIX 3.2.5, or at least, I can't see any off-hand, except some
differences in how certain applications start (info has a slightly
different look, assuming it works -- that is what is broken on my
machine). Later, there may be some third-party software that might have
different behavior between the two versions.
Impact for #2:
The time that this will take is about 3 weeks of additional development
to come up with an automatic re-install procedure, including a quick
server querying utility to prevent the server from being overloaded by
install requests. The advantage to this is that there is no chance of
version skew in the clusters, and is more supportable and the method can
later be applied to later operating system updates. The disadvantage is
that it does not allow for maintaining privatizations through operating
system updates, so this method would not be used to update private
machines, unless the workstation owner decided to initiate the
re-install. However, the Athena software will be updated regardless,
and the workstation owner could later run the procedure to re-install
the machine, if he so feels a need at a later time (and this allows him
to save what he wants).
Impact for #3:
We have not been able to come up with a method that would work, so
depending on what other methods are found, the impact cannot yet be
ascertained. The time investment is huge. Basically, some private
workstation owners have already installed other IBM products on their
machines in addition to the ones we have installed, so to update a
machine would require knowledge of their configuration, and to update
the other packages, as necessary to correlate with the rest of the AIX
3.2.5 suite. A synctree/track approach will not accomodate private
workstation owners who have installed other products.
-Richard
