[708] in Release_7.7_team
SGI 8.0 Release Goes to Field
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Fields)
Tue Aug 13 03:17:09 1996
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 03:17:05 -0400
From: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
To: athena-outage@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
The 8.0 release for Irix is now in the field. This particular field
release is a bit unusual for a couple of reasons:
A good number (a majority?) of SGIs are already running it;
all of the SGIs from the RFP that have been installed had to
run the new release, and so they were in on 8.0 early.
The remaining SGIs, running 7.7, don't know how to
automatically take 8.0 because 7.7/Irix wasn't a true Athena
release. These systems will only take 8.0 semi-automatically.
This means that they will only notice that 8.0 is available
when they are rebooted.
The previous figure of 75 minutes for the update time for an SGI to
8.0 was in error due to early problems with the update. In fact,
updating an SGI to 8.0 takes 3.5 hours (assuming no significant load
on the file server(s)). In any case, for an SGI to take the update
under normal circumstances it must be manually rebooted (just
power-cycling it will do the job). I'm not sure that we want to do
more than a few at a time because of this.
7.7 SGIs set to PUBLIC=false (via the file /etc/config/private) will
not automatically update on reboot; they must either be updated
manually, or set to PUBLIC=true (rm /etc/config/private) and then
rebooted.
For reference, the manual update procedure (for 7.7 -> 8.0 Irix ONLY):
Login as root via xlogin.
/bin/athena/detach -h -n -a
/bin/athena/attach -h -n athena-sgisys
cp /srvd/bin/athena/getcluster /bin/athena
/srvd/update_ws reactivate
(Once again, this takes about 3.5 hours.)
/etc/reboot
Craig
