[5619] in Release_7.7_team
3 October 2006 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Oct 3 17:33:59 2006
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 17:33:45 -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: 3 October 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.)
DELAYED: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena
full release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
PROGRESS: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat
JumpStart.
PROGRESS: Investigate changing Athena Linux updater to use Red Hat
Network. (Thinking of using yum instead.)
PROGRESS: (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.
DELAYED: Look into using the GNU Mailutils as an IMAP and Kerberos 5
compliant drop-in replacement for mh.
DONE: Craft remedy for firefox "locked profile" startup problem
reported by users.
PROGRESS: : Investigate Linux Firefox printing problem.
Community Milestones Met:
Patch release to fix nautilus trash handling, Firefox startup
scripts, and an accumulation of other small issues.
Other Accomplishments:
* Began evaluating SuSE and RHEL 5 as bases for Athena 9.9 release work.
* Made some adjustments to the quota warning dialogs for improved
usability.
* Drafted an Athena future develop directions document.
* Developed a fix for a Nautilus bug related to moving files within AFS.
* Updated the Flash player plugin for Athena Firefox.
* Investigated bringing the Flash player plugin local to the release.
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
or yum.
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: Investigate Linux Firefox printing problem.
NEW: Continue evaluating RHEL 5 and SuSE as bases for Athena 9.9
release work.
NEW: Begin evaluating Ubuntu as a basis for Athena 9.9 release work.
NEW: Investigate and fix a recently uncovered OpenSSH security issue.
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. Update 10/3/06: We are
seeing signs
of upstream progress on this issue, but nothing concrete.
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: Here we see the effect of cluster renewal beginning to
replace Suns with Linux systems.
SYSTYPE 04/06 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 Delta
LINUX 755 770 742 763 845 799 -46
SUN 477 463 447 431 427 347 -80
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 04/06 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 Delta
Total 1089 1128 1185 1191 1266 1291 +25
Inactive 424 474 523 547 628 606 -22
Active 665 654 662 644 638 685 +47
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: 04/06 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06
Total: 272762 241494 171323 174337 172272 272239
Unique: 10007 9949 7955 7642 9564 11202
Median: 10 8 5 5 4 10
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.)
272239 ( other 47675 quickstation 41576 cluster 67414 dialup 115574 )
Unique logins for four week period:
11202 ( other 4061 quickstation 7158 cluster 6235 dialup 4848 )
Median logins for four week period:
10 ( other 3 quickstation 3 cluster 6 dialup 5 )
