[6000] in Release_7.7_team
14 May 2008 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed May 14 16:05:51 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, 14 May 2008 16:04:56 -0400
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 14 May 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:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
PROGRESS: Create new Linux installer based on a more current RHEL 4
Kernel that includes necessary drivers for Dell Optiplex 755.
DELAYED: Develop Athena10 solution for time synchronization against
time.mit.edu (assigned to amb.)
DELAYED: Develop Athena10 solution for emacs site configuration
(assigned to amb.)
PROGRESS: Develop Athena10 solutions for other items in project plan as
resources are available.
DELAYED: Decide what we want to do about possible Athena VMware image
offering.
DONE: Review and integrate Kerberos 5 patches for Zephyr from Karl Rahm
for summer deployment on servers. (Eliminates one more Kerberos 4
dependency.)
Community Milestones Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* Packaged hostinfo from Athena utilities for Athena10.
* Created pidgin wrapper for Athena10.
* Converted Athena10 Technical Plan from html file to a wiki page
preserving the modification audit trail.
* Updated Athena10 project infrastructure for Ubuntu 8.04.
* Responded to Debian OpenSSL vulnerability by re-keying openSSH demons
on project machines.
* Integrated Solaris security patches.
* Athena10 apt repository reached milestone of being available for
testing.
* Skeletal Athena10 installer written and tested.
* Discussed changes to dot files for Athena10 and agreed upon eventual
migration from tcsh to bash as default shell.
* Fixed bash dotfile support for graphical logins.
* Alerted bash users to possible incompatibilities resulting from
aforementioned fixes.
* Implemented dotfile change to make double sided printing the default
for new users.
* Looked into issue of openGL library breakage. Current solution is to
put baseline fallback libraries into lockers containing applications
that crash with the accelerated openGL libraries.
* Debugged and crafted a solution for vold not running on most Suns.
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.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Deploy new Athena install media (CD and PXE image).
After final exams end: Deploy patch release containing: dot file
changes, OS updates for both Linux and Solaris, Solaris vold fix, and
various other bug fixes.
Issues:
A Firefox update now prompts users before sending client certificates to
servers. This is an improvement of privacy, but gets annoying. We need
to decide when to deploy this update.
There seems to be a dearth of formal documentation of Install Lore.
Additional stock answers should be written.
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.
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. UPDATE 5/14/08: SIPB
has brought up a CUPS server (cups.mit.edu) and prototyped packages
integrating Debathena with cups.mit.edu instead of using LPRng.
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.
789 linux
231 sun4
SYSTYPE 11/07 12/07 01/08 02/08 03/08 04/08 Delta
LINUX 820 799 851 834 800 789 -11
SUN 259 255 256 233 235 231 -4
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
This month we swept through the registrations and eliminated a bunch
of redundant entries.
Date 11/07 12/07 01/08 02/08 03/08 04/08 Delta
Total 2102 2173 1854 1883 1951 2052 +101
Inactive 1183 1284 1016 989 1046 1185 +139
Active 919 889 838 894 905 867 -38
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: 11/07 12/07 01/08 02/08 03/08 04/08
Total: 213877 175480 146417 217997 191221 201683
Unique: 10158 9653 8861 10013 9579 9557
Median: 6 7 4 9 8 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: May 3 04:56
201683 ( other 114721 quickstation 32048 cluster 54914 )
Unique logins for four week period:
9557 ( other 6337 quickstation 5790 cluster 5446 )
Median logins for four week period:
8 ( other 4 quickstation 3 cluster 5 )
