[6070] in Release_7.7_team
1 October 2008 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Oct 1 17:08:33 2008
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: dsps@mit.edu, owls@mit.edu, "Wilson D'Souza" <wdsouza@mit.edu>
Cc: release-team@mit.edu
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Date: Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:02:19 -0400
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 1 October 2008
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
Today is a big long status report because we're documenting explicitly
tasks that we used to just let ghudson keep track of in his head.
Accomplishments past period:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of new and current Athena releases.
Last Month's goals:
CHANGED: 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.
DELAYED: Update Solaris mini-root to avoid use of stub .mit.edu zone so that
Solaris installs to continue to work if MIT name service stops
supporting TCP access.
PROGRESS: Complete update of Athena Private Workstation Owners Guide for
Athena 10 (and decide if Athena 10 gets a separate guide, or is
integrated into the existing guide.)
Community Milestones Met:
None this month.
Other Accomplishments:
* Looked at the jdk problems that various people had after last month's update.
* Fixed crash with GNOME keyboard properties.
* Much investigation of GNOME Gconf2 for Athena 9 and Athena 10. We
discovered we could de-support some functionality here because a corner
case failure was not having user impact.
* Working on problems with the ATI proprietary video driver (big time
sink):
wdc discovered unauthorized mods caused libGL failures.
wdc, amb, alexp investigated performance problems.
wdc got a new video card for alexp.
amb tested various versions of ATI proprietary driver.
TODO: Report driver problems to ATI
TODO: Qualify driver update.
* Much work debugging installer problems in NW35 and elsewhere.
* Assisted Hotline team with Athena cluster installs.
PXE support in NW35 and flakiness remains an issue.
* Revision of "Buy Athena" web pages is complete.
* Crafted a proposal to Hotline team to power off Athena monitors
starting IAP. Proposal was accepted. We will have some work to do:
1. Schedule an IAP patch release to undo the power saver disablement.
2. Train hotline team to work with athinfo. Work with Hotline team to
refine twice-daily report and athinfo to be more useful to them.
3. Make sure users are made aware of the change in advance.
* ghudson fixed some early nasty Athena 10 bugs before waving goodbye.
* Knowledge transfer activities with ghudson.
Next month's goals:
ONGOING: Testing and bug fixing of new and current Athena releases.
OLD: Decide what we want to do about possible Athena VMware image
offering.
OLD: Update Solaris mini-root to avoid use of stub .mit.edu zone so that
Solaris installs to continue to work if MIT name service stops
supporting TCP access.
OLD: Complete update of Athena Private Workstation Owners Guide for
Athena 10 (and decide if Athena 10 gets a separate guide, or is
integrated into the existing guide.)
The previous goal of working milestones for the Athena 10 plan has
changed to the following specific tasks:
NEW: wdc will report ATI driver problems.
NEW: wdc, amb, alexp will qualify new ATI Proprietary Driver.
NEW: rbasch will implement the screensaver feature in Athena 10 at
medium priority.
NEW: rbasch will complete the SMB client work for Athena 10 at medium
priority.
NEW: amb will complete the nmh support for Athena 10 at medium priority.
NEW: amb will develop the comprehensive Cluster Installer for Athena 10
at medium priority.
NEW: amb will complete the Emacs Movemail feature in Athena 10 at low
priority.
NEW: rbasch will review the work, do some ports and propose desupports
of the Athena 10 non-standard utilities feature at low priority.
NEW: amb will implement the quickstation bugme feature in Athena 10 at
low priority.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Patch release as needed.
Issues:
ops is now taking delivery of Sun hardware that cannot install at Athena
9.3. If these machines are to be installed as Athena systems, there is
some work to do to get the previously abandoned WANBoot-based Solaris
10/Athena 9.4 installer running. wdc will follow up with ops to find out
the need level and timing of such work.
ghudson has left the Athena team for the Kerberos team. Greg had a LOT
of deep understanding that enabled him to get a lot of work done in
short time. We are ruthlessly watching the Athena 10 scope going
forward, and are evolving a sense of what the right resourcing and
approaches to Athena work should be going forward.
There seems to be a dearth of formal documentation of Install Lore.
Additional stock answers should be written. Resolved 9/3: We are
focusing on Athena 10 documentation, and considering the Athena 9
install documentation to be largely for internal consumption.
Lack of support for Kerberos 5 on the MIT PO servers is holding up
development of a solution for nmh and creates additional work for
Evolution and pine integration.
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.
Linux has standardized on the bash command shell, not the tcsh command
shell heretofore the Athena Standard. After much discussion and having
tested full support of bash, the default shell for newly created Athena
accounts should change from tcsh to bash starting on or about January 1,
2009. (Remmeber to notify athena-rcc of the change when it happens.)
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.
System counts are high this month because of renewal.
Old and new systems are counted this month. Linux count will drop next
month.
SYSTYPE 04/08 05/08 6/08 07/08 08/08 09/08 Delta
LINUX 789 798 762 740 763 827 +64
SUN 231 229 222 210 213 193 -20
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 04/08 05/08 06/08 07/08 08/08 09/08 Delta
Total 2052 2100 2136 2249 2295 2360 +65
Inactive 1185 1223 1276 1388 1419 1469 +50
Active 867 877 860 861 876 891 +15
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.
Summary: We clearly see that people have returned to campus.
Date: 04/08 05/08 06/08 07/08 08/08 09/08
Total: 201683 179262 116362 123397 117030 214085
Unique: 9557 9495 7598 6837 8604 10764
Median: 8 7 4 4 3 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 Sep 27 04:57
214085 ( other 114725 quickstation 37038 cluster 62322 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10764 ( other 7361 quickstation 6390 cluster 6184 )
Median logins for four week period:
8 ( other 3 quickstation 3 cluster 6 )
