[5310] in Release_7.7_team
Athena workstation update issues potentially affecting you
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Garry Zacheiss)
Mon Aug 29 23:43:07 2005
Message-Id: <200508300342.j7U3gxbS024127@frank-n-furter.mit.edu>
To: molecan@MIT.EDU
cc: release-team@MIT.EDU, tregan@MIT.EDU, dwyman@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 23:42:59 -0400
From: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@MIT.EDU>
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You are receiving this message because you are listed as the contact for
the following Athena workstations:
GOLD.MIT.EDU
We suspect this machine may be affected by a problem with the recent
public release of Athena 9.4 for Solaris. That release failed on older
Sun Ultra-5 and Ultra-10 machines which have only 128 MB of memory; the
lack of sufficient memory caused the update procedure to crash, leaving
the machine in an unusable state, from which the only feasible repair is
to reinstall. While we no longer support the Sun Ultra-5/10 platform,
and these machines should be replaced or retired, we clearly should have
been more careful about releasing an update which failed in this way.
If you are indeed the proper contact for any of the machines
listed below, please check the machine's state. The 9.4 update
failure state is characterized by the Athena X login screen not
appearing, and a console login failing with the error message:
ld.so.1: /usr/bin/login: fatal: libzephyr.so.3: open failed: No such file or directory
Unable to start X, doing console login instead.
If the machine does appear to have failed to update to 9.4, please
contact Hotline (x3-1410) for assistance in repairing (reinstalling) the
machine. However, please note again that these machines are no longer
supported, and should be replaced as soon as it is feasible to do so.
Note that we have moved these machines into a special "no update"
cluster, so that they will not try to update to Athena 9.4 again after
they are reinstalled and running 9.3. In addition, the update procedure
itself now has a check requiring the machine to have at least 256 MB of
memory before beginning the update to 9.4.
We deeply regret this inconvenience; we will strive to improve our
procedures to avoid such problems in the future.
Garry Zacheiss
Athena Release Team
MIT Information Services & Technology
