[5683] in Release_7.7_team
9 January 2007 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Jan 9 16:20:49 2007
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 16:14:21 -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: 9 January 2007
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: (BIG CHANGES!)
DONE: (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: Build prototype Athena 9.9 under SuSE SLED 10 to evaluate it as
a basis for next major Athena release.
CHANGED: Investigate changing Athena Linux installer to use Red Hat
JumpStart.
CHANGED: Investigate changing Athena Linux updater to use Red Hat
Network or yum.
Now that the investigation of SuSE and Athena-Lite are done, and as
ISDA ponders the future architecture of the MIT computing
infrastructure, we will to present our recommendations for moving
forward, and will initiate new project work as chartered by ISDA as
the Athena follow-on. The above two goals are superseded by the new
work and are removed.
CHANGED: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation. (Disconnected
operation has been recognized as important again.)
CHANGED: For Athena disconnected operation, craft fixes for issues
raised in testing and retest.
As we move to a non-monolithic Athena model, the approach to "Laptop
Athena" becomes fundamentally different. No comprehensive document
will describe a single integrated set of services and their level of
functionality or gotchas on the laptop. Instead individual services
will evolve their level of functionality on laptops, and customers
will mix and match as necessary. The two above goals are superseded
by the new paradigm and are removed.
DELAYED: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena
full release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
DELAYED: Look into using the GNU Mailutils as an IMAP and Kerberos 5
compliant drop-in replacement for mh.
Community Milestones Met:
Patch release containing Firefox 1.5.0.8, OpenAFS 1.4.2, OpenSSH
4.2p1, and other miscellaneous bug fixes.
Other Accomplishments:
* Fixed a crash bug in the new OpenSSH.
* Fixed a performance problem in Evolution.
* Got Purchase order to Red Hat to buy software maintenance
contacts. (As soon as this goes through, we'll open an issue on the
"clock runs backwards" problem.)
* Debugged some install problems experienced by a customer with
several systems.
* Examined Firefox 1.5.0.9 and determined it still does not have all
the fixes to the printing bug.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
OLD: Finish Solaris 10 installer integration for summer's Athena full
release.(Still awaiting server upgrade.)
OLD: Look into using the GNU Mailutils as an IMAP and Kerberos 5
compliant drop-in replacement for mh.
NEW: Write white paper that presents results of our evaluation of
SLED 10 as the basis for the next major Athena release.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release containing updated Java development kit, Firefox
1.5.0.9, fixes for OpenSSH, Evolution, jwgc, and possibly changes
relating to olc migration to RT.
Issues:
Firefox 1.5.0.9 may introduce client support issues relating to
certificates. We are investigating.
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.
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 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 11/06 12/06 Delta
LINUX 763 845 799 788 788 773 -15
SUN 431 427 347 343 338 341 +3
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 11/06 Delta
Total 1191 1266 1291 1350 1384 1426 +42
Inactive 547 628 606 670 699 722 +23
Active 644 638 685 680 685 704 +19
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: 07/06 08/06 09/06 10/06 11/06 12/06
Total: 174337 172272 272239 260454 237837 198853
Unique: 7642 9564 11202 10783 10383 10016
Median: 5 4 10 9 8 7
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 30, 2006:
198853 ( other 38751 quickstation 26229 cluster 43314 dialup 90559 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10016 ( other 3380 quickstation 5942 cluster 5385 dialup 4038 )
Median logins for four week period:
7 ( other 2 quickstation 2 cluster 4 dialup 4 )
