[1036] in I/T Delivery
WinAthena Project Status Report as of 31 Jan, 2003
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Fri Feb 7 23:20:55 2003
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 23:20:47 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200302080420.XAA19156@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: WinAthena Delivery, Integration
Team Members: Joe Calzaretta, Qing Dong, Paul Hill, Wael Hishmeh,
Dave Tanner, Tom Thornton
Report Date: 7 Feb, 2003
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/winathena
Accomplishments in January
-------------------------
The use of the WinAthena Domain again increases. Now we see about 110
active machines per day and 170 unique logins per day, averaged over
the month. See http://web.mit.edu/winathena-stat .
IAP and initial second semester courses successfully use 37-312.
The team works well with the Windows domains and servers team and the
Desktop project.
Domain containers:
Building 37 - The cluster is a glowing success and busy with routine
classes. Our machine grantor, Intel, visited the cluster and is
very impressed. Elise Riordan continues publishing new documents
for users and container admins. See:
http://mit.edu/windows/cluster
PLC - There are two containers and eight machines. Staff are using
the machines with some printing worries.
OSP - Steve Dowdy now uses a dozen machines, and hand-tests XP.
Treasurer's Office - Testing four machines, one server. Also
awaiting WinAthena under XP.
BioMicro - Patrick Paul gets yet another new container, making five,
with a dozen machines and three servers. He is a good container
admin and is a great advisor to newer customers.
There is not any news, good or bad, from owners of machines in DUSP,
SMA, NRL or MCC.
For critical bugs, see:
http://web.mit.edu/pismere/projmgt/bugs/critical.html
We spec an ICampus project, The Edge and its Parts.
We get four new IBM test Domain servers and plan to run three Domains
- the deployed win, the long-term test isnt and a short-term win
mirror named didnt.
Paul, Joe and Tom present a half-day IAP WinAthena course in 37-312.
Several other IAP courses use the classroom cluster.
Richard and Wael plan and present a global view of our server machines
and test Domains.
Dave works on the KPR MSI, and the Virus Shield installer.
Joe removes the "plop" feature from the pismere msi, and assigns the
FileZilla msi to the whole domain.
Container-admins meet 31 January in E19. Paul MCs with a GPMC demo.
We have a new watchmaker. Two have not been able to help as
previously planned.
Wael works on the W2K Delivery and High Performance Computing teams,
which will report soon.
Qing and Garry plan a transition of ttsp web page code to a production
server and build a new moira command.
Qing fixes and extends the sendbug web form.
Joe fixes rootpass, which was failing with Unicode characters.
Joe implements domain trust of \\win\dfs, required to circumvent a
hanging condition on XP SP1.
Asanka and Paul make many OpenAFS changes - we have a test installer,
which still needs work for roaming profiles.
With help from Wael and Richard, PLC installs a member server.
Wael makes contacts with MS, Dell and Ed Block, Steve Dowdy, Doug
Olander and Facilities. He helps the DART team develop analysis
processes.
Richard trains ASO on Windows, helps Steve Dowdy move a machine out of
the Orphans container and advises TomC on his Gx400. He describes
member servers for Container Admins and begins to bring up didnt.
Paul and Wael try to reproduce two Treasurer's office problems - IE
favorites links break and Outlook profile goes to Documents and
Settings\[user]\Local Settings.
Next Community Milestone
-----------------------
- Our top priority is now OSP and the Treasurer's Office - get them an
OpenAFS installer for XP.
- Deploy IE6 across the domain.
- Work with desktop-project to revise and add to the IS web presence.
Web pages will support script submission and joining student machines
to the domain.
- Continue Container Admin meetings, presenting new web pages and
documents.
Goals for February
-----------------
As last month, we still have three other priorities:
1. Install user apps;
2. Maintain and account for DC sysadmin;
3. Deploy with transition to Support and Service teams.
Item 1 includes supporting DUSP, SMA, Bldg 37 and CCR, hoping to get
help deploying user apps, ideally in AFS. Apps include Office and
IE6.
For Item 2, the new Windows Domains and Servers team will assist in
documenting administration and automated event log processing.
Item 3 relates to discussions with Support and ITLT, defining the
user-visible products we shall deliver and focusing on how best to
deploy them. Here we concentrate on Bldg 37.
Specifically we want to:
- Debug BMC's NetApp server.
- Work through the remaining SMA problems on Netscape.
- Get schema OID from Tom C.
Longer Term Goals
----------------
- We need to take over what Danilo intended to write, someday:
Kerberos work, especially KfW 2.2
WinZephyr final
DHCP & RIS
Build
- Continue to develop web pages allowing container maintenance.
- Sync our AFS code with OpenAFS via CMU.
- Get help from Garry and TomC to put non-null Kerberos instances into
Moira.
- Do further work to populate AD attributes, such as white pages info,
from the MIT data warehouses.
- Work with MS and HP to customize RIS.
Issues
-----
- With no Windows system programmer, we stretch Joe awfully thin.
- Providing a collection of licensed enduser apps will be the primary
difficulty in making WinAthena machines useful.
- Cluster administration takes too much from our developers and
admins, especially debugging joined, not RISed, machines. We hope to
make this easier and get help from the Windows Delivery team and
Service and Support processes.
- Win2K domain questions and PSS bugs take much of Paul's time.
