[523] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 6/30
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Fri Jul 6 20:39:55 2001
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 20:39:53 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200107070039.UAA24212@the-rim.mit.edu>
From: "Thomas L. Thornton" <tomt@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@mit.edu, integration-ptl@mit.edu, dennis@mit.edu,
ganderson@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: 6 Jul, 2001
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
Accomplishments in June
-----------------------
We have not heard from DUSP, but we see their machines taking
installs, and trust that no news is good news. Oliver and Mike Barker
are trying installs.
Three watchmakers graduate, three depart for the summer, one remains
and four new students are well into development. We redistribute
developer machines and order two replacement machines.
Jeff and Danilo debug IE certificates.
Mohammed begins to help with installers, so gets a machine and
learns Wise for Windows.
Joe looks at the server problem with the event log intermittently not
having access to message DLLs. This requires a DC rebuild and several
DNS zone table revisions. It is an educational experience, in which
Wael must test editing hives to avoid future disk-scrubbing on a
server.
A new backup/file server/build machine, fin, needs much hardware
diagnosis from Danilo and Wael.
Paul seeks MSDN snapshots from Mary Ann at LCS, to look at the MSIs.
Joe renews his MSDN subscription for a local copy.
Qing works on two things - a locker service mediator and a Moira DCM
population rewrite. The mediator service writes to another service
instead of allowing user-level writes to a file. This should allow
cleanup on logout and remap on login. It allows single-user operation
only. Jamie takes on an update-server DCM service for Qing's app.
Dave puts schema extensions and indexing into Moira. He resynchs
Moira and AD, and works on a standalone app to extend the schema. He
makes incremental update include Moira IDs. It is now self-repairing.
He arranges delivery to Garry, and coordinates with Qing schema
extension on brown26 and DIN.
Xiaowen integrates GSS into filezilla, an open-source GUI ftp, looking
at plop source. She writes an MSI installer for Netscape which sets
user registry and file permissions correctly.
Paul works on a campus-wide PSS agreement with MS - it has passed the
lawyers' review, but the fee to MIT is steep. We now look for funding
partners, perhaps from others who work with MS: Training; Help Desk;
Sloan; Lincoln Labs; Alumni Office; or others.
Paul visits MS for a couple days to hear the latest on Exchange
Server and SQL Server.
Jamie builds the Hesiod wshelpr2.dll, which uses the Hesiod 3.0
interface. He also ports lprng - lpq works. He modifies athinfod to
fix some run problems and look into checking the Pismere version. He
adds an option to wcdiff.
Danilo fixes krb524. He and Paul discuss 524init static builds for
the benefit of other schools. An SDK should go along with this work.
He also begins new Kerberos cache code and studies it under XP.
Before heading to Cleveland, Ian implements final changes to zephyr,
tracking the default configuration, using the Athena zephyr lib. This
provides zwrite and znol, and more may come, like zpunt.
Marek completes his attempt to set resources under VS using OLE and
sends a report to the team. He also writes a paper on translating
VBscripts into Perl. In his studies of VS 7 Betas 1 and 2 he finds a
couple places in our build tree that fail. He also examines some OS
code to do resource editing. The automation in VS .Net differs from
VS6, so he writes a script to edit version strings in resource files.
Joe studies machine attributes, such as public/private, machine and
source versions, design documents on add and attach, access on/off.
He wants to look at using XML on the GP docs. He sets an empty group
policy on the computers container to accept machines; changes spnfix
and revises the container administrators' document to mention our
computer naming convention. Also, he debugs selfmaint, and finally,
spends alot of time on folder redirection access through the
registry as opposed to a GUI, due to symptoms like JJV's browser
certificate disappearance.
Wael revises his sysadmin documents and checks them in. He gets an
RMA for the broken server and packing material and sends it back.
Paul and Tom met with ASO to begin to develop a service plan for
Pismere servers.
The lockdown phase of ITS is done, the X500 error is probably gone,
although Bob Ferrara told Paul that operators saw a single instance.
If it indeed is fixed, it would allow Danilo, Paul and Joe some more
Pismere time.
Thanks to David Mitchell, we should be able to get access to MS beta
source, allowing usage of SP and Hotfix code.
Goals for July
--------------
Our top three priorities are:
1. Install user apps;
2. Maintain and account for DC sysadmin;
3. Transition to Service teams.
Item 1. includes supporting DUSP, including get Alex P, or someone, to
build user apps in AFS. Actually at the end of May, we had a first
meeting to establish a support plan for academic software, but do not
have additional resource commitments.
2. comprises much of Wael's work in DC maintenance, and Joe's in Group
Policy, with documentation.
3. involves following up on our initial meeting with ASO, broadening
documentation, and training service team members.
Additionally, we want to:
- Implement Moira DCM performance.
- Finish and publish final CSG documents.
- Meet with Kent Post of LCS to discuss W2K domain servers.
Longer Term Goals
-----------------
- Get help from Garry and TomC to put non-null Kerberos instances into
Moira.
- Generic ftp requirements.
- Release Zephyr, Plop.
- 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.
- Work with MS to customize RIS.
Issues
------
- Support and Service staffing plans are slow to develop.
- How do we sync our AFS code with Transarc?
- When does the AUI Dash & gnome require Pismere revision?
