[4008] in Release_7.7_team
3 September 2003 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed Sep 3 14:16:05 2003
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 14:16:11 -0400
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
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Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Team
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 3 September 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: Testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.2.
DONE: Deploy new 9.2 based installers for Solaris and Linux
PROGRESS: Develop 9.2-based Solaris miniroot.
DONE (and deployed): Develop Athena 9.2 knfs port.
DONE: Evaluate laptop hardware for Athena recommendations.
PROGRESS: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock
Red
Hat Linux".
DELAYED: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
DELAYED: Integrate into the Athena release, the developed friendly way
to
go on/off net or switch interfaces.
Community Milestone Met:
Athena 9.2 patch release containing Mozilla 1.4, Evolution 1.4, and
support for native 9.2 installs (for both Linux and Solaris) targeted
for August 4.
Deploy native 9.2 installers for both platforms.
Other Accomplishments:
* Deployed additional patch release that pulled up bug fixes for
Evolution 1.4, and Mozilla.
* Made contact with Red Hat to help understand future Linux strategy.
* Kicked off a Software Release Team effort to create and deploy a AFS
Client installer for stock Red Hat Linux.
* Began planning for Athena 9.3 (feature set, improvements, upgrades,
etc.)
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
OLD: Develop 9.2-based Solaris miniroot.
OLD: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock Red
Hat Linux".
OLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
OLD: Integrate into the Athena release, the developed friendly way to
go on/off net or switch interfaces.
NEW: Publish Athena laptop hardware recommendations.
NEW: Collect statistics on 4 GB multi-partition Suns.
NEW: Investigate installing Athena software on Solaris with Solaris
package tools.
NEW: Investigate upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise Edition (scope,
timeframe, value, yes/no decision).
Next Community Milestone(s):
Bugfix patch release when next needed.
Issues:
Key learnings:
We thought it would minimize costs if we minimized the number of
vendor-supplied components we built ourselves, e.g. building only those
GNOME libraries we locally modified, and installing vendor supplied
binaries for the rest. We were wrong. Vendor supplied libraries are
shipped with their debugging bits stripped off. They also don't play
well with locally built libraries. It turns out that it is cheaper and
easier to tell the Athena build system to build subsystems wholesale
rather than picking and choosing, and patching up the failures when the
vendor libraries choke.
We plan to continue to minimize costs by building the appropriate sets
of libraries.
Additional comments:
Athena Monthly machine counts:
Method: On install, machines get a unique ID. Each day every system
reports its existance to a central syslog. This method over-counts
systems installed multiple times. Systems running Athena than 9.0 or
earlier are not counted.
systype 4/2003 5/2003 6/2003 7/2003 8/2003 Delta
linux 753 756 744 766 821 +55
sun 824 786 784 842 788 -54
Summary Analysis: Many systems were installed/renewed this month, so
the counts are probably skewed.
