[5860] in Release_7.7_team
9 October 2007 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Oct 10 18:13:53 2007
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From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:13:16 -0400
To: zips@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@MIT.EDU>
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 9 October 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:
PROGRESS: Create new Linux installer based on a more current RHEL 4
Kernel that includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 745.
PROGRESS: Develop plans for full release targeted for next summer.
PROGRESS: Obtain Optiplex 755 (745's replacement) and begin hardware
qualification on that.
Other Accomplishments:
* Planned a reduction in the W91 machine count required to maintain
the Athena release.
* Added CCISS driver support to the Linux installer.
* Added SMP versions of the ATI proprietary kernel modules to the
release.
* Fixed a bug in htmlview for URLs containing ampersands.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
OLD: Create new Linux installer based on a more current RHEL 4 Kernel
that includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 745.
OLD: Develop plans for full release targeted for next summer.
OLD: Obtain Optiplex 755 (745's replacement) and begin hardware
qualification on that.
NEW: Transfer the Linux 9.4 build machine to a virtual image.
NEW: Retire the off-cycle Solaris build machine since we're not
planning on doing another Solaris ful release.
NEW: Modify the way Athena machines process cluster information so
that machines with no cluster act like machines in the public cluster
in all cases.
NEW: Set up Athena Subversion repository and create basic structure
for Athena 10 work.
NEW: Create build scripts for creating Ubuntu Athena packages from the
new repository.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release containing /opt/mono symlink requested by Alex Prengel
and other minor fixes.
Issues:
Ops has some concerns about a desktop-server platform split (Ubuntu
vs. RHEL 4). We need to keep in communication with them about that.
We switched to using native Flash plugin packages (previously we used
the infoagents locker); unfortunately, this has meant that it is
harder for us to provide a Flash 9 plugin on Solaris because no native
package has been released. Since we have received no complaints or
requests for this upgrade, we are going to nothing until a native
package is released.
Kerberos 4 mail clients like mh, xmh, and exmh are going to die when
Kerberos 4 is shut down. Our plan is to investigate amending inc to
support Kerberos 5 as soon as the mail servers get Kerberos 5 support.
JDK 1.6 appears to interact poorly with AFS home directories under
Solaris, taking several minutes to start.
Sidney-Pacific (the graduate dorm) bought four Dimension 9200s to
upgrade their Athena cluster and found that they were unable to
install them. They are waiting on us for a new rev of the installer.
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 04/07 05/07 06/07 07/07 08/07 09/07 Delta
LINUX 798 774 792 779 815 849 +34 (Renewal)
SUN 315 308 314 303 299 278 -21
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 04/07 05/07 06/07 07/07 08/07 09/07 Delta
Total 1811 1840 1824 1765 1845 1970 +125
Inactive 969 987 969 926 993 1073 +80
Active 842 853 855 839 852 897 +45
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: 04/07 05/07 06/07 07/07 08/07 09/07
Total: 250846 217514 143980 153036 147026 254619
Unique: 9867 9730 7907 7212 9286 10981
Median: 10 8 4 5 4 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 Sep 29 04:59
254619 ( other 141045 quickstation 43023 cluster 70551 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10981 ( other 7086 quickstation 7025 cluster 6247 )
Median logins for four week period:
9 ( other 4 quickstation 3 cluster 6 )
