[5671] in Release_7.7_team
5 December 2006 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Dec 5 15:49:26 2006
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 15:49:16 -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: 5 December 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.
CHANGED: Investigate RPM issue that is resulting in deleted system
files as
a result of interrupted updates. (Although we have not heard from Red
Hat, we also have not been hearing of this failure from customers. It
may be that another change has fixed this bug. We will remove this
from our list of goals until such a time as we hear again that it is a
problem.)
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.
PROGRESS: Build prototype Athena 9.9 under SuSE SLED 10 to evaluate it
as a basis for next major Athena release.
Community Milestones Met:
None this month.
Other Accomplishments:
* Deployed replacement for Linux build machine.
* Merged OpenSSH development into Athena tree in preparation for IAP
Patch release. (Contains more modern sshd that plays well with MacOS
and Fedora Core.)
* Upgraded subversion locker version to 1.4.2.
* Hunted down status of several double free bugs that have been causing
hangs and crashes of Firefox with printing. One patch is in 1.5.0.8
which we will deploy in the upcoming patch release. The other will be
part of 1.5.0.9 which we expect to receive soon.
* Integrated several Solaris patrches. Discovered that updated Solaris
kernel did not work with OpenAFS 1.4.1, and so we require update to
OpenAFS 1.4.2.
* Integrated OpenAFS 1.4.2 on both Linux and Solaris and began testing.
* Produced stock answers describing how to burn CDs on Athena. (We use
nautilus now instead of cdrecord. This method works on both Athena and
non-Athena Red Hat systems and on SuSE SLED-10 systems.)
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.)
ON-HOLD: 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 targeted for either December 27 or Jan 2 (depending on
operational issues) containing Firefox 1.5.0.8, OpenAFS 1.4.2, OpenSSH
4.2p1, and other miscellaneous bug fixes.
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 12/5/06: Red Hat acknowledged
our new info, and asked for yet more info.
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. Because Solaris now requires OpenAFS 1.4.2, we are
upgrading.
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 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 11/06 Delta
LINUX 742 763 845 799 788 788 +0
SUN 447 431 427 347 343 338 -5
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 11/06 Delta
Total 1185 1191 1266 1291 1350 1384 +34
Inactive 523 547 628 606 670 699 +64
Active 662 644 638 685 680 685 +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: 06/06 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 11/06
Total: 171323 174337 172272 272239 260454 237837
Unique: 7955 7642 9564 11202 10783 10383
Median: 5 5 4 10 9 8
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 December 2, 2006:
237837 ( other 45917 quickstation 33346 cluster 55939 dialup 102635 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10383 ( other 3626 quickstation 6271 cluster 5607 dialup 4309 )
Median logins for four week period:
8 ( other 3 quickstation 3 cluster 6 dialup 5 )
