[564] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 8/31
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Fri Sep 7 18:13:08 2001
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 18:12:57 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200109072212.SAA12247@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: 7 Sep, 2001
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
Accomplishments in August
-------------------------
There is one new campus Pismere machine and two new machines within
IS. In other deployment news, designers of the 1:1 projects do not
plan to join those W2K machines to the win domain for now, but we
expect to deploy a new cluster of a dozen machines in Building 37 in
mid-November. Kyle intends to begin testing Pismere installation on
those. We expect, as before, that providing a collection of enduser
apps will be the primary difficulty in making that cluster useful.
We are in touch with Phil at DUSP and trying to work with Tom Grayson
to pursue an ArcInfo/ArcView installer; we have a few other
third-party app MSIs available from CMU. David Mitchell permits us to
distribute VisualStudio. Danilo finds that there is an XP product
activation required for MS volume licenses.
Tom installed and tested TSM on a Pismere machine.
Joe has been working on moving computers across containers with
oucheckd, which syncs DCs.
Wael has hotfixes, SP2, other critical updates, ie5.5 sp1 and
corrected event log parameters on all servers. We consolidate machine
room space and carts. One new machine gets a new disk. Retrospect
5.5.1 is in-house and under test.
Dave has all his revised work onto the test Moira server, ttsp.
There have been a couple new versions of the pismere-laptop MSI. They
have something new in the afs binaries and loopback adapter, selfmaint
is a bit less buggy, and for VirusScan settings, we decide to take
updates, to DAT files, directly from NAI.
We release Plop. Jamie coordinates winzephyr redesign with the SWRT,
and is close to complete with the changes. He heads to Ireland.
Qing revises the MMC snapin to work with a container object. She, Joe
and Dave work with Garry to inform him about our changes to the
schema, dcm and incremental. Qing also redoes the moira server.
Schema changes should get in by the beginning of term, ideally dcm
should, too, and incremental only if well-tested.
Daphne researches Perl DBI and installs an Oracle server.
Xiaowen has Netscape use a local cache in Temp. She finishes the Krb4
wrapper dll. She works on a FileZilla installer and doocumentation.
She makes an XML listing of packages, versions and timestamps, and
does buildinst validation. She is working on a SourceForge site for
MSI repackaging and sharing, and writes some scripts for makefiles.
The team discusses and selects items from the list of customer
communication topics IS will explore.
Danilo attends a course on, and works at file system development, in
addition to XP and Kerberos.
Paul meets with the AI Lab regarding their W2K domain.
We prepare for the the fall IT Partners conference on Thursday,
Oct. 25, 2001 in the Learning Center, W89.
Dave and Qing examine OLH to measure the effort required to port it.
Goals for September
-------------------
As last month, we still have three top priorities:
1. Install user apps;
2. Maintain and account for DC sysadmin;
3. Transition to Service teams.
Item 1. includes supporting DUSP, hoping to get help building user
apps in AFS.
For Item 2, we make progress in documenting administration, but need
to work on source code tagging and automated event log processing.
Item 3 requires follow-up on our initial meetings with ASO and
support.
Additionally we want to:
- Sync our AFS code with OpenAFS via CMU.
- Contact OSP as a possible admin PISMERE site.
Longer Term Goals
-----------------
- Get help from Garry and TomC to put non-null Kerberos instances into
Moira.
- Generic ftp packaging.
- Release Zephyr.
- 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 and HP to customize RIS.
Issues
------
- Providing a collection of enduser apps will be the primary
difficulty in making Pismere machines useful.
- Support and Service staffing plans are finally underway, yet
indefinite.
- When does the AUI Dash & gnome require Pismere revision?
