[4520] in Release_7.7_team
5 May 2004 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed May 5 13:38:10 2004
Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 13:39:17 -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: 5 May 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 9.3.
Last Month's goals:
DELAYED: Review, revise and publish document, "Differences between
Athena
Linux and stock Red Hat Linux".
DELAYED: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
DONE: Integrate into the Athena release, the developed friendly way to
go on/off net or switch interfaces with ifplugd.
DELAYED: (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.)
DELAYED: Test Athena disconnected operation.
DELAYED: Investigate new 'Captive NTFS' driver for access to NT
partitions from Linux.
PROGRESS: Update LaTeX documentation
PROGRESS: Rework Solaris Athena 9.3 install and integrity checker for
the new Sun package-based method.
Community Milestones Met:
Patch release for Linux to fix single-user boot.
Athena 9.3 Beta release targeted for April 26, shipped 4 May.
Other Accomplishments:
* Integrated SAMBA 3 with GSS into Athena release. Verified that
file-shares from win.mit.edu can be read.
* Developed documentation plan to update "How to get Athena" web pages.
* Integrated Python into Athena release.
* Received desktop Linux and Sun test systems. Did basic testing of
the Linux system and blessed the configuration for this year's buy.
* Received some Laptop test systems.
* Received multi-processor Linux server test system, did basic testing.
Raised issues of SCSI support in the Athena installer.
* Wrote System Release Notes for new 9.3 Release.
* Produced new version of mkserv for Suns that takes advantage of the
new package-based Athena release that lives all on local disk. (It
runs much faster now and does much less work. It will be further
simplified in the future.)
* Improved system counter so that the over-counting on system
re-installs will stop happening on re-installs following upgrade to 9.3.
* Configured Mozilla to use Evolution to handle "Mailto" links.
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: (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
OLD: Rework Solaris Athena 9.3 install and integrity checker for the
new Sun package-based method.
NEW: Produce stock answer for using SAMBA.
NEW: Produce new Athena installer with better SCSI support.
NEW: Write User Release Notes for Athena 9.3.
NEW: Produce mkserv SAMBA so that Athena systems can be SAMBA servers.
NEW: Produce updated "How to get Athena" web pages.
NEW: Get updated Solaris 9 source.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena 9.3 Early release targeted for June 1.
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.
Key learnings:
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.
We are relieved at long last to have a signed Red Hat Enterprise 3
contract.
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 12/2003 1/2004 2/2004 3/2004 4/2004 Delta
LINUX 783 768 803 807 787 -20
SUN 724 750 736 752 724 -28
Summary Analysis: About the same as last month.
