[5723] in Release_7.7_team
6 March 2007 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Mar 6 16:04:11 2007
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 16:04:04 -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: 6 March 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:
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:
Other Accomplishments:
* Integrated many Sun security fixes, including a kernel patch
necessitating adoption of OpenAFS 1.4.3rc2.
* Investigated Linux Daylight Savings Time issue. Concluded no
further action is necessary.
* Integrated Firefox 1.5.0.10 for Solaris. (Binary comes from Red
Hat for Linux.) This version fixes the last of our identified
printing problems.
* Began looking at getting Dell Optiplex 745 working as a Linux
Desktop recommended config to replace the now discontinued Dell
Optiplex GX610.
* Spent signnificant time with Red Hat on the "clock runs backwards"
problem.
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: Investigate need for new Linux installer based on a more current
RHEL 4 Kernel. (Current installer is based on RHEL 3 kernel and
relied on back-ported device drivers.)
NEW: Continue to work issue of clock problem with current Linux
kernel. Ideally, bring the issue to closure with an understanding of
the root cause and get Red Hat to provide a fix.
NEW: Investigate a mechanism to offer special video drivers to
cluster systems by default and to private systems as an opt-in.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release containing Firefox 1.5.0.10 and its printing fixes,
Solaris security patch, flash plug-in upgrade for linux. (May deploy
patch release in March rather than February.)
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 3/6/07: We
continue to work with Red Hat to isolate the root cause. We know
it's somewhere in the APCI code, and we are assisting in further
isolation.
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 09/06 10/06 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 Delta
LINUX 799 788 788 773 813 822 +9
SUN 347 343 338 341 329 337 +8
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 09/06 10/06 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 Delta
Total 1291 1350 1384 1426 1541 1620 +79
Inactive 606 670 699 722 791 860 +69
Active 685 680 685 704 750 760 +10
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: 09/06 10/06 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07
Total: 272239 260454 237837 198853 177729 253845
Unique: 11202 10783 10383 10016 9270 10108
Median: 10 9 8 7 5 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.)
Total logins for four week period ending March 3, 2007:
253845 ( other 150038 quickstation 41982 cluster 61825 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10108 ( other 6428 quickstation 6636 cluster 5778 )
Median logins for four week period:
10 ( other 5 quickstation 4 cluster 6 )
