[6151] in Release_7.7_team
7 January 2009 Athena Release Team Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Wed Jan 7 17:06:33 2009
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, 07 Jan 2009 17:06:45 -0500
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Team Name: Athena Release Team
Report Date: 7 January 2009
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.
CHANGED/DONE: amb will complete the nmh support for Athena 10 at medium
priority. (We have changed the scope of the feature, and called this
done.)
PROGRESS: amb will develop the comprehensive Cluster Installer for
Athena 10 at medium priority.
CHANGED/DONE: amb will complete the Emacs Movemail feature in Athena 10
at low priority. (We have changed the scope of the feature, and called
this done.)
PROGRESS: wdc will shepherd geofft's implementing the quickstation bugme
feature in Athena 10 at high priority.
DONE: wdc will research new names for session types, working to resolve
https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-1
DELAYED: wdc will investigate that it's ok policy to offer Firefox in an
Athena cluster pre-login mode.
DELAYED: If wdc determines its ok, rbasch will investigate a pre-login
option to offer Firefox in a kiosk mode.
DONE: jweiss or jdreed will talk to zacheiss about getting the Athena
Register account functioning as a fallback for no "Register for an
Athena Account" in Athena 10. (Do-able but Firefox in Kiosk mode is
preferable)
Community Milestones Met:
Other Accomplishments:
* wdc shepherded SIPB debathena delagates to Release Team.
* 9.4.51 patch release went to Dev cell.
* amb discovered problem with X configuration in Intrepid.
* alexp produced the list of software for debathena-thirdparty
* updated infrastructure to hand Ubuntu Intrepid for Athena 10.
* wdc did some testing.
* jdreed generated some Athena 10 stock answers.
* broder did work on FUSE prerequisite for resolving attach/detach
semantic issues.
* rbasch did Firefox 3 integration for Athena 9.4.
* rbasch updated Firefox fixes for Athena 10.
* rbasch investigated performance issues in Firefox 3 with AFS homedir.
Current rev of Firefox seems of adequate performance. (Keep monitoring
this going forward.)
* jdreed experimented with using Firefox 2 after having used Firefox 3:
Non catastrophic failures: certs seem still to work. History breaks
most of the time.
* jweiss has Nagios prototype now available for testing.
* wdc worked with othomas on some Solaris Sunset stuff.
* changed default spell checker in Athena 9.4 pine to be nicer.
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: amb will develop the comprehensive Cluster Installer for Athena 10
at medium priority.
OLD: wdc will shepherd implementing the quickstation bugme and other
session changes for Athena 10 at high priority.
OLD: wdc will research new names for session types, working to resolve
https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-1
NEW: rbasch will check-in Athena 10 code to set volume to 0 on cluster
machines and resolve https://jira.mit.edu/jira/browse/ATN-3
NEW: wdc will investigate that it's ok policy to offer Firefox in an
Athena cluster pre-login mode.
NEW: If wdc determines its ok, rbasch will investigate a pre-login
option to offer Firefox in a kiosk mode.
NEW: jweiss or jdreed will talk to zacheiss about getting the Athena
Register account functioning as a fallback for no "Register for an
Athena Account" in Athena 10.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena Patch release targeted for IAP containing: Video power save
patch, Firefox 3.
Patch release as needed.
Issues:
The procedure for adding another suite to Athena 10 is "rarely
performed, and the infrastructure for it is imperfect."
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. RESOLVED 1/7/09: We had a meeting
between email and Athena stakeholders and mapped out a way forward.
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.
Addressed 1/7/09.
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 7/08 08/08 09/08 10/08 11/08 12/08 Delta
LINUX 740 763 827 842 819 809 -10
SUN 210 213 193 167 155 147 -8
Count of systems registered for RHN (Non Athena update):
Date 07/08 08/08 09/08 10/08 11/08 12/08 Delta
Total 2249 2295 2360 2452 2493 +41
Inactive 1388 1419 1469 1613 1672 +59
Active 861 876 891 839 821 -18
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: 07/08 08/08 09/08 10/08 11/08 12/08
Total: 123397 117030 214085 196933 191877 244246
Unique: 6837 8604 10764 10006 9961 10560
Median: 4 3 8 8 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 Jan 3 04:58:
244246 ( quickstation 38111 cluster 58744 other 147391 )
Unique logins for four week period:
10560 ( quickstation 6337 cluster 5824 other 7050 )
Median logins for four week period:
8 ( quickstation 3 cluster 5 other 3 )
