[5950] in Release_7.7_team

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

2 April 2008 Athena Release Team Status Report

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Apr 2 14:42:52 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
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-Spam-Score: 0.00
X-Spam-Score: -5
Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:42:10 -0400
Message-Id: <1207161731.10377.20.camel@wdc-laptop>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 2 April 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:

PROGRSESS: Create new Linux installer based on a more current RHEL 4
Kernel that includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 755.
DONE: Adapt Debathena materials and procedures for Athena 10 project.
DONE: Set up apt repository for testing Athena 10 packages.
DELAYED: Develop Athena10 solution for time synchronization against
time.mit.edu (assigned to amb.)
PROGRESS: Develop Athena10 solution for emacs site configuration
(assigned to
amb.)
DONE: Develop Athena10 solution for Firefox local configuration
(assigned
to rbasch.)
DONE: Rebuild and bring online the W92 test cluster.
PROGRESS: Develop Athena10 solutions for other items in project plan as
resources are available.
DONE: Deploy work-around for memory corruption issue on IPS Athena build
server.
PROGRESS: Decide what we want to do about possible Athena VMware image
offering.

Community Milestones Met:

Other Accomplishments:

* Discussed with SIPB and Operations, what to do about Moira clients in
Athena 10.  No resolution as of yet.
* Planned for delay of Athena 10 deployment from Summer to January 2009.

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: Develop Athena10 solution for time synchronization against
time.mit.edu (assigned to amb.)
OLD: Develop Athena10 solution for emacs site configuration (assigned to
amb.)
OLD: Develop Athena10 solutions for other items in project plan as
resources are available.
OLD: Decide what we want to do about possible Athena VMware image
offering.

NEW: Review and integrate Kerberos 5 patches for Zephyr from Karl Rahm
for summer deployment on servers.  (Eliminates one more Kerberos 4
dependency.)

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.

CLOSED: 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. (Test cluster now
back online.)

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.

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  10/07   11/07   12/07   01/08   02/08   03/08   Delta
LINUX    856     820     799     851     834     800     -34
SUN      270     259     255     256     233     235     +2

Count of systems registered for RHN  (Non Athena update):

This month we swept through the registrations and eliminated a bunch
of redundant entries.

Date      10/07   11/07   12/07    01/08    02/08    03/08    Delta
Total     2034    2102    2173     1854     1883     1951     +68
Inactive  1122    1183    1284     1016     989      1046     +57
Active     912     919     889     838      894       905     +11

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:     10/07   11/07   12/07   01/08   02/08   03/08
Total:   231773  213877  175480  146417  217997  191221
Unique:   10411   10158    9653    8861   10013    9579
Median:       9       6       7       4       9       8

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: Mar 29 04:57

  191221 ( other 114086 quickstation 28824 cluster 48311 )
Unique logins for four week period:
    9579 ( other 6553 quickstation 5558 cluster 5391 )
Median logins for four week period:
       8 ( other 4 quickstation 3 cluster 5 )





home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post