[587] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 9/30
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Mon Oct 8 14:59:07 2001
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 14:59:01 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200110081859.OAA08749@department-of-alchemy.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: 8 Oct, 2001
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
Accomplishments in September
----------------------------
Several new Pismere machines are installed, with a serious disk
partition bug found. We set a plan to deploy in the next two months
to a cluster in Building 37 and to SMA classroom podia. 25 October
presentations to IT Partners take up much effort.
We have a prospective ArcInfo/ArcView installer for DUSP.
Tom works with Dave Mitchell to obtain copies of XP. Following a
meeting with Dell, they now know our frustrations with server support.
Although we believe we have approval to distribute VisualStudio, we
have not heard from John Nordlinger for specific language that the
product is to be used for academic or research purposes only.
Tom and Paul work with Matt Brody to explain what is a domain and why
we have a no domain policy. Rather than a major new Discovery project
to study other campus domains, we expect to get directors together
again to explain the domain, but Matt may want to write a Discovery
report.
Joe has been working on moving computers across containers with
oucheckd, which syncs DCs. He gives Tom Grayson a walkthrough of
installation policy on the DUSP container. He pushes the new Pismere
MSI to non-laptop containers. Athinfod works. He will shut off
redirection on Application Data and set it up for testing on Paul's
machine. The new MMC is in the nightly wash. He and Dave get
oucheckd and spnfixd working. The AD container manager work is coming
along, now with container support.
Wael continues debugging disks, servers, the DLT, and Retrospect
5.5.1. This has required and continues to require much
troubleshooting.
Garry places Pismere update server code onto the production Moira
server, ttsp.
WinZephyr rework is complete, with one remaining bug and documentation
needs.
Qing revises the MMC snapin to work with a container object. She, Joe
and Dave work with Garry. She takes up Daphne's work on winlogger,
Perl DBI and an Oracle log database.
Xiaowen works on MSI repackaging and sharing. She and Marek look at
the ArcView installer from Dave Stevens at CMU.
Danilo works on KfW 2.1.1, with fixes for XP. He will make k524init
binary available for download, making sure debug symbols are excluded.
Paul meets with the AI Lab regarding their W2K domain. He tests
redirection, he expects to see an impact on the Terminal Services
reinstallation, and will time any added duration to login.
Dave fixes dwupdate. He makes an initial port of the tty version of
the OLC browser. It compiles, but he checks it in withpout a further
estimate of several weeks' debugging. Oliver Thomas will look at it.
He examines infobot, a CMU app which may watch and index Zephyr help
messages.
Jonathan has the Zephyr snapshot and how-it-works documentation done.
He and Danilo talk to Lisa of the SWRT about remaining release issues.
Garry should look at WinZephyr, because the Athena-Unix release team
examines zephyr GUIs.
Mohammed is trying to install Pismere, and needs assistance from Wael.
He studies Wise for Windows.
Goals for October
-----------------
We will expend much efort on the IT Partners presentation.
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. Generally, Tom will work with Bob at describing Pismere
follow-on work as several efforts.
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?
