[421] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 12/31
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Wed Jan 10 11:42:36 2001
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 11:42:30 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200101101642.LAA21854@the-rim.mit.edu>
From: "Thomas L. Thornton" <tomt@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@mit.edu, integration-ptl@mit.edu, dennis@mit.edu, njj@mit.edu,
jdb@mit.edu, rar@mit.edu, vkumar@mit.edu
CC: pismere-team@mit.edu
Project Name: Pismere Delivery, Integration
Team Members: Danilo Almeida, Joe Calzaretta, Qing Dong,
Paul Hill, Wael Hishmeh, Dave Tanner, Tom Thornton
Report Date: 10 Jan, 2001
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
General
-------
The cluster machines deployment to DUSP is close but not quite ready.
The major features we need to achieve this are expanded DHCP and DNS
coverage from W92, to N42, W20 and 9; and an RIS image with the AFS
loopback/redirector. Applications in lockers awaits AFS.
Accomplishments in December
---------------------------
- DHCP: TomC has aggreed to packet-forward per subnet, planning to
upgrade in January. NetOps can get particular subnets ready by
special request.
- DNS: Danilo spoke to TomC, who expects to implement parallel
task-oriented DNS production servers machines in January in the
machine room. Chris will still be our contact person, and Wael will
send the him the zone file. We expect NetOps will put DHCP and DNS
servers on nocwatch.
- AFS: The loopback, a way to get AFS working with \\afs instead of
\\machine-afs, is in AFS 3.6, but it needs an installer for the
adapter and to write machine-afs into the hosts file. Also, we need
to make sure we do not break leash and aklog.
- Kerberos: Danilo resolved which version of Kerberos 5 goes into the
Pismere delivery, so the washing machine script now succeeds. He also
did work to allow an environment variable to set file types flagged
for CVS to ignore.
- There is a Golden Master for KfW, after Jonathan and Danilo worked
on the KfW installer and a problem with ME. Tom and Jonathan made
another KfW presentation to the Help Desk.
- We set up a meeting with (donated) Microsoft Consulting Services to
work on the RIS process.
- Tom and Lisa Robinson tested Zephyr. Ongoing alpha work with Jon
Hunt of SRT, TechPubs, and HelpDesk for KLP and Plop.
- Obtained some kind of server grant from MS and Dell, the value of
which is yet indefinite. The six servers are in the machine room and
installation is underway.
- We obtained MS RTM source code.
- Wael managed an outline draft executive summary and a survey for the
CSG domain policy study. The survey went out and at least a quarter
of the CSG schools have responded.
- Wael refreshed our Retrospect installation on the new backup server
and described it to team members to back up our development and client
machines.
- Danilo and Wael have obtained much hardware - switches, disks, and
mice, to run servers and VMWare. Wael is planning the installations.
- Joe set attribute access control that shuts off anonymous access to
the directory, and is implementing directory access control we need to
set for auditing. Joe has ntsyslog working under NT and continues to
tune reports. He wrote help files and documentation. He set the
Pismere installer to a new version number to replace older copies. He
is logging and sending email on password and log changes.
- Qing fixed Plop failure to accept a drop onto an open Plop window.
- Jamie's proposal to MS, requesting permission to distribute KLP to
other schools, is almost ready to go. Additionally, Jamie fixed bugs
in KLP under Win95, and extended features of buildinst to support
building installers in debug mode.
- Rick Grady of Microsoft got and forwarded us a response on licensing
W2K, which Paul and Tom will study and relay to others concerned with
our business model.
- Paul, Danilo and Tom held a Pismere assessment meeting with Vijay,
Bob, Susan and Greg. We will schedule a late January IS Academic
Computing session, likely to take at least a half-day.
- Qing revised SID-history, which now works for a single user or a
single group repopulate.
- Phil Thompson of DUSP is in touch. He and Tom Grayson are ready to
come visit W91 when we have an RIS client machine to show them. They
also are interested in seeing the machine room. Tom is trying to
introduce Phil, Tom and Oliver.
- John Williams and Tom Grayson asked about running W2K server - Paul
and Tom plan a meeting to explain the difficulties to them.
Goals for January
-----------------
- DHCP: discuss with TomC whether we can support multiple RIS servers.
- AFS loopback needs workarounds for clients like aklog and fs.
- Release KfW.
- Get Garry and TomC to help us to put non-null Kerberos instances
into Moira.
- Procure another Rose 2x8 switch for the servers.
- Joe continues to write up policies and ACLs. This is related to Joe
beginning to look at access on/off acting on Jamie's earlier findings.
- Joe should tell Kretch what we like and dislike about winlogger.
- Dave and Qing plan to work with Paul on ashpool to test schema
extensions.
- Kevin is looking at our internally-developed ftp, and should compare
it to kftp.
- Continue MS conulting to implement an RIS reinstall method to
auto-detect the computer container and a router address.
- Kent Post of LCS and Phil Thompson od DUSP may need a meeting with
Paul and Tom to explain the difficulties of W2K domain servers.
Longer Term Goals
-----------------
- Generic ftp requirements.
- Release Zephyr, Plop and KLPR.
- Generic logging library proposal - package NT syslogger for other
schools, and get tech pubs help from here or a requesting school.
- We need to do further work to populate AD attributes, such as white
pages info, from the MIT data warehouses.
- Continue planning post-pilot work.
- Develop another group policy - making the My Computer icon
reflect the actual machine name. This probably requires a new app
using nonstandard API calls. It is still under much study.
Issues
------
- Will ITS work transfer resources from Pismere a month? This may
slip an IAP pilot date.
- When shall we get MS SP and Hotfix source?
- How do we sync our AFS code with Transarc?
- When does the AUI Dash & gnome require Pismere revision?
