[681] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 31 Dec 2001
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Fri Jan 11 17:37:47 2002
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 17:37:43 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200201112237.RAA00379@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: 11 Jan, 2002
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
Accomplishments in December
---------------------------
Some new Pismere machines are installed, with a few minor
reinstallation problems. We have a new Pismere MSI deployed this
month. We still plan to deploy to a cluster in Building 37. SMA
classroom podia are in a debugging stage, tackling multiple subnets,
printer installation and certificates questions. DUSP is using their
four machines. CCR staff continue investigations, suggesting a
January meeting.
Tom and Paul finished a draft of the Dell server white paper, on hold
pending replacement of the backup server.
Tom joined source-reviewers to monitor UNIXAthena changes we should
track.
Jonathan got IIS and Oracle working, but not yet Project Central.
Danilo wrote generalized printer installation scripts.
Danilo did KfW2.1.2 beta binaries, sources, and SDK, working with the
SWRT on the KfW 2.1.1 installer. The latter was released this month.
Danilo and Joe got the help compiler into our build.
Danilo & Wael described backup server problems in many conversations
and letters to Dell.
Wael tested the SP2 MSI on permutations of an installed W2K system,
and XP.
Dave deployed the new add, attach and detach, and he revised
incremental for machine membership, while Qing revised bulkload and
the Moira snapin.
Dave began to build lprng. He got lpr, lpq and lprm working with the
SourceForge lprng.
Qing wrote logging processes for logins. She moved report statistics
to a locker, winathena-stats, built graphs. See
http://web.mit.edu/winathena-stat.
Qing looked into publishing printers through the AD.
We brainstormed on missing features impairing the deployability of
pismere.
Dave and Qing moved their test domain development from BROWN26 to
ISNT, with a revised schema.
Ian works on installing the MyTex version of LaTex.
Wael requested replacement of a drive on ntb.
Wael Dave and Qing replace the populator machine with a newer, bigger,
faster one.
Joe works on the AD container manager snapin, with htmlhelp, to be
extended for machines in groups.
Goals for January
-----------------
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, SMA and CCR, hoping to get help
building user apps in AFS. Apps include ArcView, LaTex, MatLab,
netpb, ProEngineer.
For Item 2, we make progress in documenting administration, but need
to work on source code tagging and automated event log processing. We
expect to build new utilities to scan a machine for local integrity.
Item 3 requires follow-up on our initial meetings with ASO and
support. An ASO position needs to be filled. We expect another
presentation to Service and Support in late January.
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.
- 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?
- Paul and Tom expect to allocate a significant portion of their time
over the next few months to the new HP project.
