[21554] in Athena Bugs
Re: Fwd: Matlab installation on Athena is not working (case
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Jamous)
Tue Mar 4 09:38:45 2003
Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20030304091738.01feea30@hesiod>
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2003 09:38:27 -0500
To: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@mit.edu>
From: Daniel Jamous <jamous@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@mit.edu, amb@mit.edu, casetracker@mit.edu,
Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>, Phillip Long <longpd@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200303040019.TAA24207@m1-115-11.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Dear Garry,
Thank you very much for your prompt response and for checking room 1-115.
The temporary workaround would be great. The class is meeting this
afternoon between 4 and 6pm and again on Thursday at the same time. If you
or Camilla could manually set the machines to run Matlab locally before
this evening's class that would be great and we could see if the problems
still happen then. Otherwise, before next class on Thursday if possible.
I'm planning to attend the class this afternoon and observe what is going on.
Alex also mentioned that he would be willing to change the acls on the
locker- but would need to know exactly how to set the acls as he hasn't
done IP acl'ing before. What commands should he run? Also, how long
approximately would it take to get that running?
With respect to your question about last semester: I had a phone
conversation with one of the ChemE faculty members yesterday evening and it
turns out that the homeworks for this semester are not the same as last
fall so some of the problems might have something to do with the M-files
(MATLAB scripts) that they're using. The enrollment last fall was the same
(basically the whole classroom is full). I also know of another class in
ocean engineering that is using MATLAB in the same room and they haven't
encountered this kind of problems. So, I'm going to investigate their
M-files and see if I can reproduce the problems myself.
Thanks again.
I'm going to be at a meeting this morning but will be back in the office
this afternoon.
Daniel
At 07:19 PM 3/3/2003 -0500, Garry Zacheiss wrote:
> 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
