[4289] in Release_7.7_team
7 April 2004 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed Apr 7 13:57:17 2004
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 13:57:35 -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: 7 April 2004
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
Accomplishments past period:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.2.
Last Month's goals:
DELAYED: Review, revise and publish document, "Differences between
Athena
Linux and stock Red Hat Linux".
DELAYED: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
PROGRESS: Integrate into the Athena release, the developed friendly way
to
go on/off net or switch interfaces with ifplugd.
DONE: Implement prototype for installing Athena software on Solaris with
Solaris package tools.
DELAYED: Develop additional simple command-line tools for manipulating
mail in
IMAP. (Existing ways of doing seemingly simple things are rather
baroque.)
DELAYED: Test Athena disconnected operation.
DONE: Decide which Linux platform for next Athena release.
DELAYED: Investigate new 'Captive NTFS' driver for access to NT
partitions from Linux.
DELAYED: Update LaTeX documentation
DONE: Test new Athena Linux installer with resizing of Windows
partitions.
Community Milestones Met:
Patch release during Spring Break with Sun patches, Mozilla 1.6 and
other small stuff. (March 22)
Athena 9.3 Alpha release targeted for April 1, shipped April 1 on
Linux, and April 5 for Solaris.
Other Accomplishments:
* Deployed NTFS resizing in Athena Linux Installer.
* Talked with hardware vendors about this year's new offerings.
* Received Solaris Hardware Upgrade Release that supports new SunBlade
1500. That new release was integrated into the Athena 9.3 Alpha in
place of the previous epoch of Solaris 9.
* Recraft of Athena 9.3 Solaris to live all on local disk was
completed.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
OLD: Review, revise and publish 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 with ifplugd.
OLD: (Low priority background task) Develop additional simple
command-line tools for manipulating mail in IMAP. (Existing ways of
doing seemingly simple things are rather baroque.)
OLD: Test Athena disconnected operation.
OLD: Investigate new 'Captive NTFS' driver for access to NT partitions
from Linux.
OLD: Update LaTeX documentation
NEW: Rework Solaris Athena 9.3 install and integrity checker for the
new Sun package-based method.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release for Linux to fix single-user boot.
Athena 9.3 Beta release targeted for April 26.
Bugfix patch release when next needed.
Issues:
We are in crunch time for the new Athena release.
Any work not directly related to the Athena 9.3 release will be of low
priority and will be delayed until the new release work is done.
The lack of a signed Red Hat Enterprise contract is STILL uncomfortable
for us.
Key learnings:
We have fewer than ever Alpha testers. More functionality seems to be
in the Beta release for testing and less in Alpha,so we're shortening
the duration of the Alpha phase and lengthening the duration of Beta by
one week each.
Additional comments:
We're considering bringing OpenOffice to the local disk (using the
"local locker" framework) for Athena 9.3 if we have some sense that it
will not take unreasonable space.
Athena Monthly machine counts:
Method: On install, machines get a unique ID. Each day every system
reports its existence to a central syslog. This method over-counts
systems installed multiple times. Systems running Athena than 9.0 or
earlier are not counted.
SYSTYPE 11/2003 12/2003 1/2004 2/2004 3/2004 Delta
LINUX 815 783 768 803 807 +4
SUN 750 724 750 736 752 +16
Summary Analysis: About the same as last month.
