[5755] in Release_7.7_team
10 April 2007 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Thu Apr 12 16:54:00 2007
From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: owls@mit.edu, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@mit.edu>, zips@mit.edu
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Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:42:49 -0400
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 10 April 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.
DONE: 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.)
PROGRESS: 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.
DONE: Investigate a mechanism to offer special video drivers to cluster
systems by default and to private systems as an opt-in.
Community Milestones Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Upgraded subversion locker to 1.4.3 and fixed a problem with the
library path.
* Released Athena Patch to correct telnetd security vulnerability.
* Began investigating installing VMWare player on Athena machines at
request of alexp.
* Created new Solaris build machine to replace old one that suddenly
died.
* Integrated many Solaris security patches, and a patch to fix
single-user boot.
* Integrated OpenAFS 1.4.4 for Sun because it was required after
installation of the security patches
* Tested Athena on Optiplex 745 hardware. Identified need for new disk
driver, new Ethernet driver, and perhaps use of ATI proprietary video
driver. This means we need new Athena installer based on RHEL 4.
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.
OLD: 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: Create new Linux installer based on a more current RHEL 4 Kernel
that includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 745.
NEW: Continue investigating installing VMWare player on Athena machines.
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 10/10/07: We
continue to work with Red Hat to isolate the root cause. We know
it's somewhere in a particular composite patch, 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 10/06 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 03/07 Delta
LINUX 788 788 773 813 822 810 -12
SUN 343 338 341 329 337 320 -17
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 10/06 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 03/07 Delta
Total 1350 1384 1426 1541 1620 1764 +144
Inactive 670 699 722 791 860 937 +77
Active 680 685 704 750 760 827 +67
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: 10/06 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 03/07
Total: 260454 237837 198853 177729 253845 225843
Unique: 10783 10383 10016 9270 10108 9838
Median: 9 8 7 5 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 7 April 2007:
225843 ( other 143158 quickstation 32373 cluster 50312 )
Unique logins for four week period:
9838 ( other 6371 quickstation 6069 cluster 5451 )
Median logins for four week period:
9 ( other 4 quickstation 3 cluster 5 )
