[5918] in Release_7.7_team
6 February 2008 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Feb 6 15:01:32 2008
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: zips@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@mit.edu>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu
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Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:00:18 -0500
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 6 February 2008
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 755.
(Further progress is blocked until W92 test cluster back online.)
DONE: Crystalize details of Athena10/Debathena collaboration to
determine what the build scripts and source control will look like.
DONE: Finish importing Debathena materials into Athena 10 repository.
PROGRESS: Adapt Debathena materials and procedures for Athena 10
project.
PROGRESS: Set up IPS build server for Athena 10.
PROGRESS: Set up apt repository for testing Athena 10 packages.
CHANGED: Set up HTTP gateway for apt repository.
(We are using stuff.mit.edu from SIPB until we better understand the
actual requirements.)
Community Milestones Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Outreach to Canonical to discuss options for Ubuntu collaboration.
* Set up an automatic checkout of Athena10 SVN repository.
* Reviewed old bug reports, resolving many.
* Answered query about why tools in psutils require authenticated
access. (We're not licensed to give them out to the wide world.)
* Resolved issue of OpenOffice failure on Suns.
* Integrated Xcluster patch from Macathena developers in SIPB.
* Several team members met individually with Mike Gettes to discuss the
future of Athena.
* Resolved issue of Debian native vs. non-native versioning for Athena
packages.
* Resolved issue of how to build Athena checkouts from Athena10.
* Wrote scripts to handle decided upon solution to "Athena checkouts"
build issue.
* Responded to query by IS&T Security team member about Firefox 2.0.0.11
vulnerability. (Reviewed and provided additional perspective on the
issue.)
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 755.
OLD: Adapt Debathena materials and procedures for Athena 10 project.
OLD: Set up IPS build server for Athena 10.
OLD: Set up apt repository for testing Athena 10 packages.
NEW: Develop Athena10 solution for time synchronization against
time.mit.edu (assigned to amb.)
NEW: Develop Athena10 solution for emacs site configuration (assigned to
amb.)
NEW: Develop Athena10 solution for Firefox local configuration (assigned
to rbasch.)
NEW: Rebuild and bring online the W92 test cluster.
NEW: Develop Athena10 solutions for other items in project plan as
resources are available.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release when necessary.
Issues:
NEW: Lack of support for Kerberos 5 on the MIT PO servers is holding up
development of a solution for nmh, and may create extra work for
integrating Evolution and alpine into Athena 10.
NEW: It is increasingly difficult to integrate MIT's custom LPRng
printing solution into modern client desktops. In concert with Server
Operations we are investigating changes which would allow us to use
native printing software, possibly at the expense of completely
de-supporting client-side authenticated printing.
NEW: Test Cluster dis-assembled as part of the redo of office space.
This is impacting roll-out of the new Athena installer, and will impact
our ability to respond to issues requiring testing.
Ops has some concerns about a desktop-server platform split (Ubuntu
vs. RHEL 4). We need to keep in communication with them about that.
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.
CLOSED: 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.
Customer has been informed of work-around. We're closing this issue.
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.
851 linux
1 sgi
256 sun4
SYSTYPE 08/07 09/07 10/07 11/07 12/07 01/08 Delta
LINUX 815 849 856 820 799 851 +52
SUN 299 278 270 259 255 256 +1
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
This month we swept through the registrations and eliminated a bunch
of redundant entries.
Date 08/07 09/07 10/07 11/07 12/07 Delta
Total 1845 1970 2034 2102 2173 1854 -319
Inactive 993 1073 1122 1183 1284 1016 -268
Active 852 897 912 919 889 838 -51
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: 08/07 09/07 10/07 11/07 12/07 01/08
Total: 147026 254619 231773 213877 175480 146417
Unique: 9286 10981 10411 10158 9653 8861
Median: 4 9 9 6 7 4
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 Sat, 2 Feb 2008 07:00:00:
146417 ( other 100455 quickstation 22734 cluster 23228 )
Unique logins for four week period:
8861 ( other 5290 quickstation 5061 cluster 3885 )
Median logins for four week period:
4 ( other 3 quickstation 2 cluster 3 )
