[5772] in Release_7.7_team
8 May 2007 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue May 8 20:33:15 2007
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 20:32:31 -0400
To: owls@MIT.EDU, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@MIT.EDU>, zips@MIT.EDU
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 8 May 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:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
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: 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. (Red Hat has
identified the cause of the problem and we have identified the best
workaround until they fix it in their upstream kernels. Andrew will
code a patch to turn on the noapic boot option on the affected
hardware.)
PROGRESS: Create new Linux installer based on an RHEL 4 Kernel that
includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 745. (Testing work done
to verify that RHEL 4.5 will work for this.)
PROGRESS: Continue investigating installing VMWare player on Athena
machines. (Alex Prengel is working on getting permission from VMWare
to distribute the player to Athena machines.)
Community Milestones Met:
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.)
Other Accomplishments:
* Backported the "run application" performance fix in gnome-panel and
deployed it in the most recent patch release.
* Did some testing of Athena accounts with uids greater than 65536.
Everything seems to work.
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: Create new Linux installer based on a more current RHEL 4 Kernel
that includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 745.
OLD: Continue investigating installing VMWare player on Athena machines.
NEW: Code a patch to turn on the noapic boot option on the hardware
affected by the clock problem.
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 as 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 5/8/07: Red Hat
has identified the root cause of this problem (which is a BIOS
defect) and expects to have a workaround in their kernel as of RHEL
4.6. In the meantime, our lowest-cost workaround is to specify the
noapic boot option on machines with the affected hardware.
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.
Update 5/8/07: We are thinking about less traumatic ways to keep MH
running, such as finding a way to combine the mitmail programs and
the inc program using an intermediate local store.
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 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 03/07 04/07 Delta
LINUX 788 773 813 822 810 798 -12
SUN 338 341 329 337 320 315 -5
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 03/07 04/07 Delta
Total 1384 1426 1541 1620 1764 1811 +47
Inactive 699 722 791 860 937 969 +32
Active 685 704 750 760 827 842 +15
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: 11/06 12/06 01/07 02/07 03/07 04/07
Total: 237837 198853 177729 253845 225843 250846
Unique: 10383 10016 9270 10108 9838 9867
Median: 8 7 5 10 9 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 May 5, 2007:
250846 ( other 150968 quickstation 38591 cluster 61287 )
Unique logins for four week period:
9867 ( other 6403 quickstation 6333 cluster 5639 )
Median logins for four week period:
10 ( other 4 quickstation 3 cluster 6 )
