[5418] in Release_7.7_team
1 March 2006 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Mar 1 15:06:06 2006
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v623)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Message-Id: <1fa75a3282690ea8fc2dd135a0fa54bb@MIT.EDU>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 15:06:17 -0500
To: ois@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU
X-Spam-Score: 1.217
X-Spam-Level: * (1.217)
X-Spam-Flag: NO
Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 1 March 2006
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:
DELAYED: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation. (Disconnected
operation has been recognized as important again.)
DELAYED: 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. (Still awaiting news from Red Hat.)
PROGRESS: Discuss project plans for long term Athena work.
DELAYED: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena
full release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
DELAYED: Tweak Linux Athena install to install 9.4 directly rather than
as an update from 9.3.
DELAYED: Investigate update to OpenSSH to comply with gssapi-with-mic
which would interoperate with the RHEL 4 and MacOSX code base. Issues:
backward compatibility with older gssapi OpenSSH clients, and getting
resources to do the work.)
DELAYED: Update remote connections document in OLH.
DONE: Explore/prototype migration from locally developed login
framework to using PAM.
DELAYED: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat
Network.
PROGRESS: Target for June: Integrate Firefox 1.5 for possible
deployment in a Summer patch release.
CHANGED: Investigate using stock Firefox 1.5 for Athena 9.4. (Under
both Linux and Solaris, though the source for Firefox would be
different for each platform.)
DELAYED: Explore prototype Linux Athena release using stock Kerberos.
DELAYED: (Big) Develop prototype Athena 9.5 release incorporating what
has been learned about reverting to stock software to improve readiness
for deploying lower cost Athena Release model.
Community Milestones Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Prepare jwgc for integration into next Athena patch release.
* Updated Fall Readiness Team.
* Did some prep work for hardware recommendations.
* Much energy put into W92 cleanups and office moves.
* Developed change to automatically rebuild damaged AFS cache
partitions on Linux machines.
* Several bug fixes.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
OLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation. (Disconnected
operation has been recognized as important again.)
OLD: 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. (Still awaiting news from Red Hat.)
OLD: Discuss project plans for long term Athena work.
OLD: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena full
release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
OLD: Tweak Linux Athena install to install 9.4 directly rather than as
an update from 9.3.
OLD: Investigate update to OpenSSH to comply with gssapi-with-mic which
would interoperate with the RHEL 4 and MacOSX code base. Issues:
backward compatibility with older gssapi OpenSSH clients, and getting
resources to do the work.)
OLD: Update remote connections document in OLH.
OLD: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat Network.
CHANGED: Target for June: Integrate Firefox 1.5 for deployment in a
Summer patch release possibly using stock build.
OLD: Explore prototype Linux Athena release using stock Kerberos.
OLD: (Big) Develop prototype Athena 9.5 release incorporating what has
been learned about reverting to stock software to improve readiness for
deploying lower cost Athena Release model.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Possible patch release to deploy new OpenAFS client if it is determined
that it will remedy problems.
Issues:
All this reorganization has left us very little time for doing any
Athena work, and so most of our goals this month were delayed.
Kerberos 4 mail clients like mh, xmh, and exmh are going to die when
Kerberos 4 is shut down. We need to think about how we will move users
to working clients. We probably need to announce these clients are
de-supported.
Our concern about AFS robustness has shifted. We are tracking and
frequently taking OpenAFS updates, and actively involved in further
testing and debugging. Update 3/1/06: A recent OpenAFS 1.4.1 releae
candidate has been deployed to dialups and seems to have fixed the
Solaris file corruption problem. We hope OpenAFS 1.4.1 gets released
soon so we can standardize on it.
We are crafting a patch to remedy the timeout problem with AFS in
disconnected operation. (If you start AFS when you're off-net you hang
for a long time.) Update 3/1/06: We are planning to incorporate this
into a patch release soon.
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.
Summary: We see a downward trend on Athena systems, but it is unclear
if those systems are re-emerging as RHN systems or simply going
offline.
SYSTYPE 09/2005 10/2005 11/2005 12/2005 01/2006 02/2006 Delta
LINUX 793 768 769 744 759 773 +14
SUN 513 503 483 478 476 498 +22
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 09/05 10/05 11/05 12/05 01/06 02/06 Delta
Total 723 779 841 872 983 1034 +51
Inactive 205 243 291 316 369 404 +35
Active 518 536 550 556 614 630 +16
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: 09/05 10/05 11/05 12/05 01/06 02/06
Total: 316832 300252 271574 225346 203385 260397
Unique: 11608 11081 10592 10094 9450 10322
Median: 10 10 9 7 5 9
