[4663] in Release_7.7_team
7 July 2004 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed Jul 7 14:06:51 2004
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 14:07:15 -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 July 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: (Low priority background task) Develop additional simple
command-line tools for manipulating mail in IMAP. (The whole set we
feel are necessary are now done.)
DELAYED: Test Athena disconnected operation.
PROGRESS: Investigate new 'Captive NTFS' driver for access to NT
partitions from Linux.
DONE: Produce stock answer for using SAMBA.
PROGRESS: Produce new Athena installer with better SCSI support.
DONE: Write User Release Notes for Athena 9.3.
DELAYED: Produce mkserv SAMBA so that Athena systems can be SAMBA
servers.
PROGRESS: Get updated Solaris 9 source.
DONE: Verify knfs works with Athena 9.3.
DONE: Review and get deployed updated "How to get Athena" web pages.
PROGRESS: Deploy new Solaris Athena 9.3 install and integrity checker.
DELAYED: Improve Linux Athena installer documentation.
Community Milestones Met:
Athena 9.3 Early release as scheduled on June 7.
Other Accomplishments:
* Took Mozilla 1.7 into the release. This puts Athena back on an
officially stable branch with a low risk improved version (that
includes new Kerberos support), but represents a non-ideal coordination
with browser-release. We're going to offer Athena as a 1.7 test
platform over the summer, and to also offer to do extra work if
browser-release members flag issues.
* We got a service agreement with Sun into place to make it easier to
get patch source.
* IBM seems to have come through with a new technical liaison.
* We have identified many issues with doing laptop Linux hardware
qualification.
* We modified xlogin to change from the IS logo to the IS&T logo.
* Added automatic ticket renewal to the Athena screensaver.
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: Test Athena disconnected operation.
OLD: Investigate new 'Captive NTFS' driver for access to NT partitions
from Linux.
OLD: Produce new Athena installer with better SCSI support.
OLD: Produce mkserv SAMBA so that Athena systems can be SAMBA servers.
OLD: Get updated Solaris 9 source.
OLD: Deploy new Solaris Athena 9.3 install and integrity checker.
OLD: Improve Linux Athena installer documentation.
NEW: Publish stock answer for using SAMBA.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena 9.3 Public release re-targeted for July 12 on Solaris, and July
13 for Linux.
Bugfix patch release when next needed.
Issues:
Key learnings:
Additional comments:
We are finally exiting Athena release crunch time, so other stuff that
has been delayed will start getting done.
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 2/2004 3/2004 4/2004 5/2004 6/2004 Delta
LINUX 803 807 787 802 742 -60
SUN 736 752 724 722 681 -41
Summary Analysis: This count shows an unusually large drop. We expect
this is because systems are offline for summer vacation. For example
student-owned systems, and systems shut down for clusters taken offline
for renewal.
