[380] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 10/31
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Tue Oct 31 18:13:16 2000
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 18:13:05 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200010312313.SAA18564@department-of-alchemy.mit.edu>
From: "Thomas L. Thornton" <tomt@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@mit.edu, integration-ptl@mit.edu, dennis@mit.edu, hogue@mit.edu,
jdb@mit.edu, rar@mit.edu, vkumar@mit.edu
CC: pismere-team@mit.edu
Project Name: Pismere Delivery, Integration
Project Leader: Tom Thornton
Report Date: Oct 31, 2000
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
General
-------
For the goal of a fall deployment of cluster machines in Department of
Urban Studies and Planning, major things needed to achieve this are:
Campuswide DHCP, otherwise expand coverage from W92, to N42, W20 and 9
DNS infrastructure
AFS redirector
Directory population of groups
Registry settings
Applications in lockers
It is not clear to us that DHCP and DNS will happen before the W92
machine room is fully operational. Otherwise we have made steps
toward solutions in all these features. The pilot delivery seems to
be, at best, several weeks away.
Students are back at work and very productive.
Accomplishments in October
--------------------------
- Completed budgets for two fiscal years.
- Pismere remote installer with group policy works on all our
machines. It can put a subset of tools, including Qing's MMC Moira
utilities snap-in, into a new Start Menu hierarchy. At this time the
user is required to take action to install the application suite. We
are investigating some interactions with Roaming Profiles before we
try to install the application suites without any user intervention.
- Remote-installed another watchmaker and another test machine. We
are talking to Microsoft about getting them to donate Microsoft
Consulting Services to improve the RIS process. This should not
prevent an initial deployment but we have concerns about the
scalability and sustainability of the current RIS process.
- Performed Retrospect client back up.
- Worked around Kerberos 1.2 library dependency for user apps. Alpha
releases with Jon Hunt of SRT, TechPubs, and HelpDesk:
KfW 2.1
KLPR
Zephyr
Plop
- AFS 3.6 is in the build tree.
- Sized AD, finished spec for new servers, and requested grants from
MS and Dell.
- Dave populated the AD with users from Moira.
- Qing wrote AD disaster recovery SID rebuild from Moira.
- Worked with NetOps to assist with AD population, Athena backup, and
syslog. We need to do further work to populate AD attributes, some
from Moira, and some from the MIT data warehouses.
- MSDN now coming to N42 addresses.
Goals for November
------------------
- Pismere remote installer needs to set path and registry.
- Generic ftp requirements.
- Release Zephyr, Plop, KfW and KLPR.
- Expand DNS. DHCP to N42, W20 and 9.
- Get NetOps to put our test DNS server into production in the Machine
Room.
- Get Garry and TomC to help us to put non-null Kerberos instances
into Moira.
- Access on/off plan.
- Generic logging library proposal.
- Defragment the AD. Complete work on populating the AD with SID
histories from Moira. Add acls and suppression.
- Install BDC.
- Put the syslog utility on all machines, set them to audit changes on
a local password, and send email on a hit. We need to prove syslog is
working.
Longer Term Goals
-----------------
- Obtain new servers.
- Procure a Rose 2x16 switch for the servers.
- Write up W2K departmental server deployment paper for CSG.
- Propose to MS distributing KLPR to other schools.
- Plan post-pilot work.
- Obtain MS help to design an RIS reinstall method to auto-detect the
computer container and a router address.
Issues
------
- When shall we get MS RTM source code? Hotfix source?
- How do we sync our AFS code with Transarc?
- Does the AUI Dash & gnome require Pismere revisions?
Additional comments
-------------------
Barring unforseen Kerberos, AFS or AD obstacles, we should be able
to meet our fall pilot date.
