[21548] in Athena Bugs
Re: Fwd: Matlab installation on Athena is not working (case 349557)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Garry Zacheiss)
Mon Mar 3 19:19:50 2003
Message-Id: <200303040019.TAA24207@m1-115-11.mit.edu>
To: Daniel Jamous <jamous@MIT.EDU>
cc: bugs@MIT.EDU, amb@MIT.EDU, casetracker@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 03 Mar 2003 17:29:52 EST."
<5.1.0.14.2.20030303165937.01fecaf0@hesiod>
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 19:19:49 -0500
From: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@MIT.EDU>
Hi Daniel,
Camilla and I went to 1-115 this evening to take a look at the
problem. Everything I saw points to the problem being a network issue;
in particular, the output for "ifconfig eth0" on these machines shows a
sizeable number of transmit errors that increases when I load a large
software package out of AFS, or download a large file via Mozilla.
ifconfig also indicates a large and increasing number of packet
collisions.
Some investigation of the network topology for the room
indicates there's a 10Mb switch between it and the rest of the world, so
it's not surprising that running large applications out of AFS will have
problems; having a class of 20 people do it will just make things worse.
I'm not entirely certain why they didn't see problems last term (lower
enrollment?) but we have had problems of this sort in 1-115 before,
although at the time I think it was loading applications off of an NFS
server that was the problem.
As to what we can do, I can suggest a temporary workaround, and
a longer term correct solution. The temporary workaround will be to
sync the matlab locker local onto these machines' internal disks, much
the same way we bring Mozilla and Adobe Acrobat Reader local. We can
either automate that by having alexp IP acl the matlab locker, or we
could do it by hand and clean it up later; I'm willing to deal with
doing this if you need a solution ASAP.
The longer term solution will be to get the network service in
this room upgraded. Contacting network@mit.edu and vdist@mit.edu about
replacing the remaining repeaters in this building with switches was
recommended to me as the correct approach for requesting the upgrade.
If you have any questions about any of this, please don't
hesitate to let us know.
Garry
