[902] in I/T Delivery
Pismere Project Status Report as of 30 Sep, 2002
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Sat Oct 5 19:57:42 2002
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 19:56:54 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200210052356.TAA12845@mass-toolpike.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: 5 Oct, 2002
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/pismere
Accomplishments in September
---------------------------
The number of WinAthena AD containers remains constant, including
those outside IS and those for development, N42 and other intra-IS
tasks.
Also as of 1 October, we see about 50 active machines per day and
almost 90 unique logins per day, averaged over September. Compared to
August, this is a level state for machines, but significant growth in
users.
DUSP - no news.
BioMicro - seem happy, Patrick has a working DFS symbolic link, but he
hints at some Netapp problems. He needs some guidance on the
Intel1000 NIC.
SMA - Chad will take it up after 37.
Building 37 - Intel machines are in and Chad begins installing one.
With a first-draft image, he creates and succesfully installs another
machine using RIPrep, thanks to Richard's tireless work.
W89 pilots encounter a problem with instloop, attributable to calling
a faulty MS function. Asanka, Joe and Paul set a workaround, which
will be deployed in the next pismere.msi. Unfortunately, the Krb
1.2.6 import attempt still fails, and requires remote and eagerly
anticipated response from Danilo.
We hear reports of requested clusters in Simmons and Sydney-Pacific,
wondering about the support implications, so Owls assigns
responsibility for such requests to ac-proposals, who also will build
a web page.
We postpone reviewing resumes for a (partial at best) Danilo
replacement.
We conduct the second monthly Container Admins meeting, discussing
PXE, SP3, Group Policy (GP), new mailing lists, new documentation, new
web forms and Remote Installation.
We solicit bids from Compaq/HP and IBM for test domain servers. The
quote from Compaq/HP is high; IBM are slow, but a quote is reasonable.
We design a new set of CaseTracker categories.
We welcome back Marek and Xiaowen.
Paul works on the certificate enrollment problem caused by an MS
Update hot fix. He prototypes a web page to request switching a
machine container. He reproduces Steve Dowdy's personal menus bug on
one machine.
Asanka finds that on XP, AFS needs XP1. He, Joe and Richard debug AFS
under XP.
We see detestable messenger service spam, discuss disabling it and
decide to leave it on until we test it here, then advise the container
admins.
Joe researches a GP auto hot fix process whereby we choose which hot
fixes to allow. He will present it to the October container admin
meeting
Joe changes the Perl MSI to install to C: on multi-drive machines,
pushing it to 37. He changes the instrumentation in instloop to use
logging libs, for Paul's debugging. Joe plans to deploy SP3 with a
mid-October timeline, after testing to pismere-* containers. He has a
new instloop, a new Perl, and a message service switch.
Qing gets the password dictionary from Mark. She, Dave and Paul
resolve the issue of the change password web page possibly interfering
with incremental update password regeneration by using a flag in a
user schema extension. This requires an OID from network operations,
which Paul has requested.
The winlogger database keeps running out of space. Qing deletes some
records, gets more space and proposes a filter at the client or
server, and using a purge date. She convinces Garry to use our
population script for machine containers, and paves the way to move
the Tomcat server into Services, after Paul and Richard discuss it
with Jonathon and netops.
Richard and Joe see XP SP1 Explorer always brings up a warning dialog
during login-after.
Richard develops Veritas backups, creates several RIS images,
including the default one for the 530 in 37. He tests RIPrep, SP2 and
SP3 MSI. He updates rin2 to allow W2K server and XP RIS images. He
finds the Overland DLT is breaking, investigates a backup drive, and
after some diagnostics, the autoloader behaves better.
Wael chases down the StorCase order at GovConnection, assembles it.
He assists testing auto hot fixes, RIS and SPs, both standalone and
slipstreaming. He works with container admins and revises DNS entries
for data-loss. He records some video training clips. He maintains
watchmaker machines.
Dave has incremental rebuilt and checked in. He works on the LPRng
klptray, redirector and lpspooler, getting get them into a
comprehensive build. He presses on installing redmon and Krb libs,
then will designs function loading. LPRng spooler now does Krb
authentication.
Tom gets a winathena locker, which initially will hold our video and
graphics, but we expect Support will use it as the deployment web
site.
Tom attends AeroAstro and Civil ICampus presentations, noting that
none use XP or .net, yet. Dave Mitchell agrees that Paul should
provide to all ICampus students some WinAthena background briefing,
perhaps in November.
We plan interaction with the Windows Domain/Server delivery project.
A PSS bug-reporting process and mailing list are underway.
Next Community Milestone
-----------------------
- For MIT users, we have a final WinZephyr binary ready for packaging
by SWRT. When group security on Moira is deployed, users will have
LDAP-invisible lists.
- Present a couple courses at the 24 October IT Partners day, a
WinAthena User and another Container Admin track.
- Conduct a Container Admin meeting, presenting GP auto hot fix
process.
Goals for October
----------------
Our top priority is delivering a working 37 cluster, despite
postponing replacing Danilo.
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 building user apps in AFS. Apps include ArcGIS, Maya, MatLab and
ProEngineer.
For Item 2, we make little progress in documenting administration,
source code tagging and automated event log processing. In the short
run we will be interviewing candidates. Later, we expect to build new
utilities to scan a machine for local integrity.
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:
- Deploy SP3 and a new pismere.msi conatinin a message service off
switch, instloop and Perl.
- Continue transition of WinAthena Tomcat to Service.
- Test ArcView 3.2 and 8.
- Work through the remaining SMA problems. Paul works on printer
drivers and Netscape.
- Danilo intends to write:
Kerberos work, especially KfW 2.2
WinZephyr final
DHCP & RIS
Build
- Test XP in the domain.
- Richard will provide BMC help with the Intel1000 NIC.
- Joe will take the new MSDN subscription and will deal with indexing
and sharing it.
- Get schema OID from Tom C.
Longer Term Goals
----------------
- Continue to design a web page allowing student machines to join the
domain.
- Sync our AFS code with OpenAFS via CMU.
- Get help from Garry and TomC to put non-null Kerberos instances into
Moira.
- 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, especially in Service and
Support.
- 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 Pismere machines useful.
- Cluster administration takes too much from our developers and
admins. We hope to make this easier in order to get help from the
Service and Support processes.
- We await HP project reports, and could really use those features in
deploying packages.
- Win2K domain questions and PSS bugs take much of Paul's time. He
expects many meetings and consultations to come.
- When does the AUI Dash & gnome require Pismere revision?
