[6080] in Release_7.7_team
5 November 2008 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Nov 5 17:09:53 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, 05 Nov 2008 18:02:54 -0500
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 5 November 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 new and current Athena releases.
Last Month's goals:
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.)
CHANGED: wdc will report ATI driver problems. (It was our fault.)
DONE: wdc, amb, alexp will qualify new ATI Proprietary Driver.
DONE: rbasch will implement the screensaver feature in Athena 10 at
medium priority.
DONE: rbasch will complete the SMB client work for Athena 10 at medium
priority.
DELAYED: amb will complete the nmh support for Athena 10 at medium
priority.
PROGRESS: amb will develop the comprehensive Cluster Installer for
Athena 10 at medium priority.
DELAYED: amb will complete the Emacs Movemail feature in Athena 10 at
low priority.
DONE: rbasch will review the work, do some ports and propose desupports
of the Athena 10 non-standard utilities feature at low priority.
PROGRESS/CHANGED: amb will implement the quickstation bugme feature in
Athena 10 at low priority.
Community Milestones Met:
None this month.
Other Accomplishments:
* jdreed has improved the Athena 10 install doc.
* wdc has been paying attention to the debathena Zephyr class to learn
more about how debathena technical discussions take place.
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 (Decision: Athena 10 gets a separate guide.) Also to resolve
https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-2
OLD: amb will complete the nmh support for Athena 10 at medium priority.
OLD: amb will develop the comprehensive Cluster Installer for Athena 10
at medium priority.
OLD: amb will complete the Emacs Movemail feature in Athena 10 at low
priority.
CHANGED: wdc will shepherd geofft's implementing the quickstation bugme
feature in Athena 10 at high priority.
NEW: rbasch will make sure lynx is in athena-cluster-software and
configure the infoagents locker properly for Athena 10, and thereby
resolve https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-6
NEW: wdc will research new names for session types, working to resolve
https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-1
NEW: rbasch will investigate setting volume to 0 on cluster machnes and
resolve https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-3
NEW: rbasch will investigate logging of root commands on cluster
machines and thereby resolve https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-7
NEW: alexp will investigate if we can de-support setup in Athena 10.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena Patch release containing: Linux ATI driver update, Firefox
update, Sun security patches, keyboard preference handling fix, and some
misc Red Hat OS updates.
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.
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 05/08 6/08 07/08 08/08 09/08 10/08 Delta
LINUX 798 762 740 763 827 842 +15
SUN 229 222 210 213 193 167 -26
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 05/08 06/08 07/08 08/08 09/08 10/08 Delta
Total 2100 2136 2249 2295 2360 2425 +65
Inactive 1223 1276 1388 1419 1469 1566 +97
Active 877 860 861 876 891 859 -32
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: 05/08 06/08 07/08 08/08 09/08 10/08
Total: 179262 116362 123397 117030 214085 196933
Unique: 9495 7598 6837 8604 10764 10006
Median: 7 4 4 3 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 Nov 1 04:58
196933 ( other 108624 quickstation 32433 cluster 55876 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10006 ( other 6586 quickstation 5886 cluster 5791 )
Median logins for four week period:
8 ( other 3 quickstation 3 cluster 5 )
