[5648] in Release_7.7_team
7 November 2006 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Nov 7 16:07:05 2006
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 16:06:41 -0500
To: owls@MIT.EDU, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@MIT.EDU>, zips@MIT.EDU
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 7 November 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.)
ON-HOLD: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat
JumpStart.
DELAYED: Investigate changing Athena Linux updater to use Red Hat
Network or yum.
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: Investigate Linux Firefox printing problem: We know the cause.
We submitted a patch upstream to Mozilla.org, but received no reply as
of yet.
PROGRESS: Continue evaluating RHEL 5 and SuSE as bases for Athena 9.9
release work.
DONE: Begin evaluating Ubuntu as a basis for Athena 9.9 release work.
DONE: Investigate and fix a recently uncovered OpenSSH security issue.
Community Milestones Met:
None this month.
Other Accomplishments:
* Extensive testing of SuSE Linux Laptop functionality. wdc was
surprised at how much "just worked".
* Developed bug fixes to jwgc jabber client.
* Discovered, identified and fixed a bug related to the
interoperability of the GSSAPI-keyex user auth mechanism in OpenSSH.
* Integrated new version of pine to resolve LDAP interoperability issue.
* Evaluated Firefox 2.0 and updated the MIT extension to Firefox to
function with 2.0.
* Submitted bug report to OpenAFS maintainers regarding building
OpenAFS under SuSE.
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: Build prototype Athena 9.9 under SuSE SLED 10 to evaluate it as a
basis for next major Athena release.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release if necessary.
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 11/7/06: Red Hat asked for more
info which we have supplied, but which they have not yet acknowledged.
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 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 Delta
LINUX 770 742 763 845 799 788 -11
SUN 463 447 431 427 347 343 -4
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 Delta
Total 1128 1185 1191 1266 1291 1350 +59
Inactive 474 523 547 628 606 670 +64
Active 654 662 644 638 685 680 -5
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: 05/06 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06
Total: 241494 171323 174337 172272 272239 260454
Unique: 9949 7955 7642 9564 11202 10783
Median: 8 5 5 4 10 9
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 ending: Oct 28 04:57:
260454 ( other 49025 quickstation 37580 cluster 63142 dialup 110707 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10783 ( other 3942 quickstation 6657 cluster 5894 dialup 4645 )
Median logins for four week period :
9 ( other 3 quickstation 3 cluster 6 dialup 4 )
