[4211] in Release_7.7_team
Please review: Presenting the Solaris Athena 9.3 recrafting.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Feb 11 17:41:57 2004
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu, mjv@mit.edu
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Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:41:53 -0500
Monday during the time normally spent in the Owls meeting, I schmoozed
with Phil Long and told him about our plans for recrafting Athena
Solaris. He asked me to make a presentation to the Faculty Liaisons on
it.
Enclosed is my own sort of "white paper" on what it's about.
Could y'all review it and tell me if I got my facts right, and make any
further suggestions for giving a sensible presentation.
-wdc
Changes coming with Athena Solaris 9.3
Customers have expressed reluctance to use Athena Solaris because it
was too different from what they were used to.
The upcoming Athena 9.3 release for Solaris will make two changes that
these potential customers may find significant:
Athena moves to the local disk.
Athena uses Sun pkgadd for everything, not just the OS.
Issues in all-local Athena:
Customers familiar with Solaris system administration expressed
confusion over the Athena practice of dividing the installed software
between files kept on the local disk, and files kept in a /srvd
hierarchy in AFS. Linux Athena has always put everything on the local
disk. Solaris Athena presented a conversion challenge: some old
systems were partitioned such that an all-local install would fail.
We have inventoried the affected systems (under 77 at this
point). They're all past the age where we said they'd be supported,
but we're taking the attitude of being helpful to either renew the
hardware, find a graceful time to re-install (and get the new
partitioning), or explicitly to get sign-off to keep the system
at 9.2.
Issues in installer tools:
The original Athena install used platform independent, locally
developed tools to clone an Athena system from a master image.
Customers found that image model too confining. Later Athena installs
would use the vendor supplied tools for operating system install, but
would use locally developed tools for the Athena value-added services.
Linux Athena used native Linux RPM for everything.
Solaris used Sun pkgadd and patchadd for the OS, but would use a tool
called 'track' to put in the Athena bits.
Starting with Solaris Athena 9.3 the additional utilities,
applications, services and configurations will be installed with RPM
on Linux, and pkgadd on Solaris.
Value:
These two changes will create a Solaris installation that will be much
more familiar to customers with Solaris system administration
experience. There will be no unusual file organization or unusual
software installation tool to learn. It will be a very usual Solaris
install with some third party packages added in.
Future:
When these two changes are complete, the mkserv tool will end up
having to do much less work. The future plan is to replace mkserv
with something that will do the minimum required to add those services
as value-added packages.
Additional packages of services heretofore considered too complex for
mkserv will be able to be crafted as Linux RPM's and Solaris pkgadd
packages. For example, an MIT-tailored apache web server package.
