[6221] in Release_7.7_team
Meeting Notes: Release Team: Tuesday 2/24/09 in W91-250
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Feb 24 15:20:06 2009
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@mit.edu
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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:21:00 -0500
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Next Meeting: Will be 3/3 at 1:30 in a location to be announced.
The agenda will center around Athena 10 Early Release.
Release Team: Tuesday 2/24/09 in W91-250
Present:
wdc, alexp, jdreed, geofft, rbasch, aurora, jweiss, sml, amb, broder,
tabbott
Agenda:
1. Check-ins on Action Items
jdreed: Where are we in crafting the merged Athena apt repository
write access guidelines? jdreed will ping for bullet points. tabbott
will try and send some.
jdreed: What is status of switching default shell to bash?
jweiss: Any update on Ops's take on the Athena Dialups Situation?
There are important logging features that Ops is not resourced to port
to Linux. Debathena folk think they can help.
2. Questions for team to review:
* Decide what to do with the conflicting meeting originally scheduled
for 3/10.
A: We will meet next week on 3/3.
* When are we going to do some Early cluster installs?
3. Punch List to Athena 10 Early Cluster go-live (2 open issues):
ATN-19 "Switch User" renders Public system un-usable.
rbasch will implement "Disable Flexiserver" patch.
ATN-30 trackerd may break AFS: Need to confirm or reject this.
"Enable indexing=false" is the current default.
4. Important Athena 10 issues:
We should craft our next top 10 list.
5. Other
Q: Should we notify user of:
Background update?
Impending reboot as a consequence of a background update?
A: User impact of background update should be minimal.
We will monitor the situation during Early to see if the rebooting and
background activity has a user impact.
----
We have received a status update on the "allow third-party" feature
needed for clean upgrades of the Ubuntu OS to include Athena. It has
been coded and checked in. We do not know if it's part of the upgrade
from Intrepid to Jaunty.
----
We have mentioned to Ops that an upgrade of the Zephyr servers with the
Kerberos 5 code would be desirable before Registration day of Fall term
2009.
----
PO15 testing: We should be more organized.
Tests:
Kerberos 5 GSSAPI config for mutt, pine, alpine, evolution, Apple Mail,
and to re-confirm that a Kerberos 4 Eudora is unhappy talking to a K5
server. (Name is uname.po15.mail.mit.edu for testing.)
We will check in on status next week.
----
Firefox extension integration with debathena-standard:
We will investigate more offline.
----
Low UIDs: Scanning AFS for use of low UIDs is required, but requires a
software development project to perform.
Ops will put the AFS janitor some place accessible to Release Team in
case a debathena volunteer has a chance to produce the appropriate
crawler.
----
TAP Findings:
"Approved with Concerns":
1. Utilize Upstream Provider: Do enforce blackout dates on updates
coming from upstream. TAP recommends an MIT Mirror.
Release team points out that a mirror is not so easy a thing to produce
and maintain as one would ideally like. The problem is the Ubuntu
Archive GPG signs the entire archive. You can't pick and choose from
the archive and still pass the integrity check.
This would mean that updates would either be frozen out, or if we
required one security update, we'd enable all security updates.
A client-side "don't update anything" with a list of exceptions would
not work because updated packages on a repository erase the old package.
This would mean that a system installed during the blackout period would
have different packages than existing systems.
Release team also believes that debathena-workstation in addition to
debathena-cluster systems might want to participate in the blackouts.
2. Cluster Installation and Update Process: Review Ghost, VMware and
other mechanisms for installing and updating with less network impact
than just running the regular Ubuntu installer.
3. Third Party Applications: Explicitly review Ubuntu support by third
party software providers.
4. Metrics: Current metrics are insufficient for capacity planning,
cluster management, and understanding who uses Athena for what.
Consider improving metrics and their presentation.
-Bill
