[6013] in Release_7.7_team
4 June 2008 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Jun 4 15:52:48 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, 04 Jun 2008 15:52:05 -0400
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 4 June 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.
DONE: 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.
Community Milestones Met:
Deployed patch release containing: dot file changes, OS updates for both
Linux and Solaris, Solaris vold fix, and various other bug fixes.
Other Accomplishments:
* Updated Athena10 build machine from Gutsy to Hardy.
* Adapted build system configuration to account for changes made by SIPB
project members.
* Did the Evolution work for Athena10.
* Did the LaTeX work for Athena10.
* Analyzed pine changes relative to Athena 9.4. Implementation is
pending.
* Began organizing Athena10 Preview work as a "Sprint" agile method.
* Various updates to the Athena10 package repository to keep it in sync
with the source tree and kernels released by Debian and Ubuntu.
* Crafted Wiki page to show progress on Athena Installer work at:
https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/ZEST/Athena+Installer+2008
* Crafted Wiki page to track revisions to the "Buy Athena" web pages at:
https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/ZEST/Revise+Buy+Athena+online+Documents
* Made house call to MIT Libraries to address an Athena Install problem.
(Seemed to be caused by a peculiar RAID configuration: RAID and Grub
disagreed about which disk was drive A or B.)
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of current Athena release.
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).
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, creates additional work for Evolution
and pine integration.
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. RESOLVED 6/4/08: We
have a plan for Athena10 which will build upon the SIPB cups.mit.edu
prototype.
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 12/07 01/08 02/08 03/08 04/08 05/08 Delta
LINUX 799 851 834 800 789 798 +9
SUN 255 256 233 235 231 229 -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 12/07 01/08 02/08 03/08 04/08 05/08 Delta
Total 2173 1854 1883 1951 2052 2100 +48
Inactive 1284 1016 989 1046 1185 1223 +38
Active 889 838 894 905 867 877 +10
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: 12/07 01/08 02/08 03/08 04/08 05/08
Total: 175480 146417 217997 191221 201683 179262
Unique: 9653 8861 10013 9579 9557 9495
Median: 7 4 9 8 8 7
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 31 07:00
179262 ( other 109647 quickstation 28191 cluster 41424 )
Unique logins for four week period:
9495 ( other 6220 quickstation 5694 cluster 5100 )
Median logins for four week period:
7 ( other 3 quickstation 3 cluster 4 )
