[5604] in Release_7.7_team
5 September 2006 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Sep 5 16:04:55 2006
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 16:04:38 -0400
To: owls@MIT.EDU, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@MIT.EDU>, zips@MIT.EDU
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 5 September 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.
PROGRESS: Investigate RPM issue that is resulting in deleted system
files as
a result of interrupted updates. (Still awaiting news from Red Hat.)
DELAYED: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena
full release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
DONE: 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: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat
JumpStart.
DELAYED: Investigate changing Athena Linux updater to use Red Hat
Network.
DELAYED: (Big) Develop prototype Athena 9.9 release incorporating what
has been learned about reverting to stock software to improve readiness
for deploying lower cost Athena Release model.
DONE: Qualify new hardware recommendation. Target May 1.
DELAYED: Look into using the GNU Mailutils as an IMAP and Kerberos 5
compliant drop-in replacement for mh.
DONE: Follow up on issue submitted to bugs about how queued email gets
high spam score.
PROGRESS: Craft remedy for firefox "locked profile" startup problem
reported by users.
DONE: Integrate Firefox 1.5.0.5 into Athena release using native RedHat
RPM.
DONE: Develop change for Public Athena Workstation verification to
permit the exception list to be modified outside the release cycle.
Community Milestones Met:
Patch release including Firefox 1.5.0.5 (with fixes to startup and
printing problems), quota warning dialogs, Public Workstation
verification fixes, sendmail direct delivery change, and additional
MIME application configurations.
Other Accomplishments:
* Committed patch from outside to make liblocker to authenticate to AFS
in a more modern fashion reducing Kerberos 4 dependency.
* Investigated and addressed an issue where the new Red Hat kernel was
causing intolerable clock skew on some hardware. Opened bug ID 203818
with Red Hat.
* Integrated Athena-local changes into OpenSSH 4.2p1 and released for
testing. Currently in testing on Athena Dialups. Expect to release to
general public over IAP. This new version adds compatibility for OS/X,
and Red Hat Enterprise while retaining compatibility with our installed
base.
* Investigated issues related to Kerberos ticket lifetime that were
affecting some Athena users. We understand the issue, and have work
arounds, but a true fix is probably of greater scope than people will
want to deal with in the context of a Kerberos 4 phase-out.
* Fixed a bug in the script that cleans temporary areas of the disk.
* Changed the way we handle SMP kernels under Linux to allow us to
downgrade kernels in a release without breaking SMP support.
* Changed handling of temporary files in Firefox so that users are less
likely to lose work in a temporary directory on Athena cluster
workstations.
* In W92 Test Cluster, replaced ancient Dell GX150 with this year's
Athena system: Dell GX620.
* Modified Xenity to allow error and warning messages to be selectable
for user paste-in to bug reports. Sent modification upstream and
pointed out how our way is more closely compliant with their user
interface guidelines.
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: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena full
release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
OLD: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat
JumpStart.
OLD: Investigate changing Athena Linux updater to use Red Hat Network.
OLD: (Big) Develop prototype Athena 9.9 release incorporating what has
been learned about reverting to stock software to improve readiness for
deploying lower cost Athena Release model.
OLD: Look into using the GNU Mailutils as an IMAP and Kerberos 5
compliant drop-in replacement for mh.
OLD: Craft remedy for firefox "locked profile" startup problem reported
by users.
NEW: Investigate Linux Firefox printing problem.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release to fix nautilus trash handling, Firefox startup scripts,
and an accumulation of other small issues.
Issues:
The latest Red Hat kernel introduces a clock skew problem that renders
it unusable on some of our supported hardware. We need this issue
resolved before we can use their latest kernel release. If absolutely
necessary, we could craft a local fix for this problem, but we would
like to avoid this if possible.
Kerberos 4 mail clients like mh, xmh, and exmh are going to die when
Kerberos 4 is shut down. Our plan is to investigate the Gnu Mailutils
as a way to offer the same functionality with Kerberos 5.
OpenAFS: OpenAFS 1.4.1 has been working for the most part. We have an
issue with file locking that seems to affect Firefox startup. We are
investigating.
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 03/06 04/06 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 Delta
LINUX 752 755 770 742 763 845 +82
SUN 474 477 463 447 431 427 -4
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 03/06 04/06 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 Delta
Total 1041 1089 1128 1185 1191 1266 +75
Inactive 391 424 474 523 547 628 +81
Active 653 665 654 662 644 638 -6
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: 03/06 04/06 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06
Total: 257153 272762 241494 171323 174337 172272
Unique: 9872 10007 9949 7955 7642 9564
Median: 9 10 8 5 5 4
Breakdown for current month:
(Total of unique logins will be less than the sum of the sources, since
each source login only gets counted once.)
Total logins for four week period:
172272 ( other 31220 quickstation 20726 cluster 19298 dialup 101028 )
Unique logins for four week period:
9564 ( other 2691 quickstation 5195 cluster 3733 dialup 4109 )
Median logins for four week period:
4 ( other 2 quickstation 2 cluster 2 dialup 4 )
