[5224] in Release_7.7_team
3 August 2005 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Aug 3 15:06:16 2005
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 15:06:32 -0400
To: owls@MIT.EDU, ois@MIT.EDU
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 3 August 2005
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 current Athena release.
Last Month's goals:
ON-HOLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
CHANGED: Implement strategy for migrating Athena bug reports from
discuss to GForge. (We want to look at a tool called Trac first.)
ON-HOLD: For Athena disconnected operation, craft fixes for issues
raised in testing and retest.
DELAYED: Investigate RPM issue that is resulting in deleted system
files as
a result of interrupted updates.
DELAYED: Discuss project plans for long term Athena work.
DELAYED: Implement Java3d request.
PROGRESS: Integrate gaim into release if decision is made to move
forward. (Work is now blocking on the existence of a jabber server.)
PROGRESS: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena
full release.
CHANGED: Athena Public Release targeted for August 8 if AFS issue is
resolved. (Our contingency plan is to deploy 9.4 functionality on RHEL
3 which does not require a new AFS. The specifics need to be worked
out. Working AFS for RHEL 4 is still a nicer alternative.)
Community Milestones Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Looked into adding SRV support to gaim.
* Looked at HP Linux workstation but did not like it as much as the HP
PC, owing to the workstation's use of newer NIC and SATA support that
were missing from the Athena install media.
* Contacted Simon Wilkinson and obtained Kerberos support patches for
gaim.
* Various team members took lots of vacation time in order to avoid
losing it.
* Added compatibility gettext library to Solaris release to improve
locker software backward compatibility.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
ON-HOLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
ON-HOLD: For Athena disconnected operation, craft fixes for issues
raised in testing and retest.
OLD: Investigate RPM issue that is resulting in deleted system files as
a result of interrupted updates.
OLD: Discuss project plans for long term Athena work.
OLD: Implement Java3d request.
OLD: Integrate gaim into release if decision is made to move forward.
OLD: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena full
release.
NEW: Prepare contingency Linux Athena 9.4 release based on RHEL 3.
CHANGED: Implement strategy for migrating Athena bug reports from
discuss to new tool: Investigate Trac as a possible successor to GForge.
CHANGED: Deploy Athena 9.4 release the week of August 29th. If the AFS
problem is resolved by August 15, 9.4 will be based on RHEL 4,
otherwise it will be based on RHEL 3.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena Public Release targeted for week of August 29th.
Bugfix patch release when next needed.
Issues:
Getting a working AFS as we adopt RHEL 4 with the 2.6 kernel is a
problem. The current version of AFS occasionally kills RHEL 4 client
systems. The test of roll-back to 1.3.81 failed. We are continuing to
work the issue, but also crafting an RHEL 3-based 9.4 contingency
release.
A timeout problem with AFS in disconnected operation (If you start AFS
when you're off-net you hang for a long time.) was thought to be fixed
but is not. We consider this a show-stopper for graceful disconnected
operation, and have put other disconnected operation work on hold until
this issue is resolved. (We think we can resolve this issue by setting
AFS to
start on first network up event (like we do for zhm) instead of at boot
time. (Have not had time to investigate as of August 3.)
Lack of certain long-ago requested Solaris Source modules is preventing
forward progress on a direct install of Solaris 10, on updating dialup
servers to Solaris 10, and porting knfs to Solaris 10. Dialup upgrades
are not yet urgent. We are investigating WANBoot instead of CNBoot.
We have requested Owls investigate sunset of KNFS. We are also
investigating trying to use Open Solaris for the necessary modules.
License for the source arrived from Sun for MIT to evaluate on 2
August.
Red Hat seems to have decided to delete GSSAPI Kerberos support from
OpenSSH. Development of Kerberos support by OpenSSH.org seems to be
going in a different direction than we'd ideally prefer. This may spell
more integration effort by MIT for Kerberos in OpenSSH in the future.
(August 3: Investigating possibilities is planned but we've not had
time to do so.)
The developers have lots of vacation time to "use or lose". We are
working this issue and hope to meet our deadlines without sacrificing
much in the way of accrued vacation. (Many non-critical goals were on
hold this month.)
Key learnings:
Additional comments:
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 02/2005 03/2005 04/2005 05/2005 06/2005 07/2005 Delta
LINUX 770 762 743 732 700 648 -52
SUN 621 627 627 617 608 620 +12
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 07/05 08/05
Total 599
Inactive 148
Active 451
Monthly Athena Login counts:
Method: By reviewing of the logs of the service that makes
personalized notifications to users at login time, we are able to count
the number of unique Athena logins. Here we display the total number of
logins over a four week period, the number of logins by unique user ID
and the median number of logins per unique user ID.
Date: 02/05 03/05 04/05 05/05 06/05 07/05
Total: 353970 308526 334070 300274 215206 219674
Unique: 10847 10493 10492 10465 8659 8390
Median: 12 10 12 10 5 6
