[625] in DeathTongue Changes
Maintaining locker software for WinAthena machines?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arun A Tharuvai)
Sun Mar 21 09:56:55 2004
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 09:56:44 -0500 (EST)
From: Arun A Tharuvai <aatharuv@MIT.EDU>
To: sipb-discussion@MIT.EDU, licks@MIT.EDU
cc: aatharuv@MIT.EDU
[I've sent this mail to sipb-discussion@mit.edu and licks@mit.edu (the
discussion list for deathtongue, SIPB's WinAthena machine), bcc'ing it
to sipb-office@mit.edu . If you want to get on sipb-discussion, ask me
or any other sipb member. If you want to get on licks, just add yourself
since it's public. Discussion should go to sipb-discussion and licks.]
I recently got a request to maintain Windows software for the im locker.
Not being around, this isn't something that's very feasible for me to do,
but I wondered whether SIPB might want to consider maintaining software
packages for them? Naturally, most people with private workstations are
just going to install software locally, but as the number of windows
cluster machines increases[1], the number of people of people logged in to
machines they don't maintain increases, and the benefit/work ratio for
installing locker software goes up.
Is it still worth it for SIPB to start doing builds for win32 (or
even just installs of "freeware" packages that can be redistributed),
that would be useful to people forced to use windows, especially free
software? Or is the benefit for doing so still too small?
Arun
[1] http://web.mit.edu/winathena-stat/ indicates that there are about 400
WinAthena machines. About 25 of them are in the building 37 cluster, and
I don't know how many others are in departmental clusters at this point.
Also, the number of daily logins to winathena machines is increasing.
