[968] in I/T Delivery
WinAthena Project Status Report as of 30 Nov, 2002
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas L. Thornton)
Tue Dec 10 17:05:28 2002
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:03:29 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200212102203.RAA29936@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: WinAthena Delivery, Integration
Team Members: Joe Calzaretta, Qing Dong, Paul Hill, Wael Hishmeh,
Dave Tanner, Tom Thornton
Report Date: 10 Dec, 2002
Submitted by: Tom Thornton
URL: http://web.mit.edu/winathena
Accomplishments in November
--------------------------
Again the number of WinAthena AD containers increases, still
indicating an exponential growth in use. As of 2 December, we see
about 90 active machines per day and 140 unique logins per day,
averaged over the month. Compared to November, this again reflects a
20% increase.
DUSP - Phil Thompson says all is well.
BioMicro - Patrick Paul has a workaround to his NetApp server, while
Paul debugs it.
SMA - Chad will take up podium machines after 37.
Building 37 - Open for business.
OSP - Steve Dowdy has several machines working, with few minor
problems, but WinAthena needs to run under XP for his department-wide
deployment.
Treasurer's Office - there are a couple machines joined, but TO also
is a fast-track move of the entire department to WinAthena, including
XP machines.
PLC - Kyle joins machines and hand-installs software.
The team as a whole routinely reviews critical bugs. See:
http://web.mit.edu/pismere/projmgt/bugs/critical.html
BMC AFS testing shows a client bug in filename display, now fixed.
Microsoft visits to discuss ways of packaging products, especially
MSIs.
Building 37 is installed and first-pass tested. The first class, a
week-long MatSci ThermoCalc unit, was a success. With Elise Riordan
hard at work, there are published new documents for users and
container admins. See
http://mit.edu/is/athena/windows/cluster
Testing of utilities attach and add shows a filename bug, now fixed.
Dave Tanner has KPRng done under W2K and the old SDK; XP is next. He
proves LDAP code works with SP3. He builds a NetShield installer.
Richard helps track 37 bug reporting and suggestions to container
admins. He tests a new IE6 installer. He puts the StorCase unit onto
Rin2 with new DFS structure and copies over previous file systems.
Tom Coveney attends team meetings representing the Windows
Domain/Servers delivery team. He installs, tests and explains TSM
5.5.
Qing has a new web form for container admins to request container job
scheduling. The delete-machine and changepasswd web pages work. She
presents them at the 22 Nov container admin meeting.
Joe finishes new print scripts to replace the domain-wide printer
creation that Danilo did. He deploys it.
We conduct another monthly Container Admins meeting, this one
dedicated to web forms, plus printer, hotfix and GP presentations.
We order IBM test domain servers.
Asanka and Paul approach a working installer with some more bug fixes
to OpenAFS on XP SP1.
We have had to drop plans to build and test installers for ArcView 3.2
and 8.
Next Community Milestone
-----------------------
- Our top priority is now OSP and the Treasurer's Office - get them an
OpenAFS installer for XP.
- Work with desktop-project to revise and add to the IS web presence.
- Continue Container Admin meetings, presenting new documents.
Goals for December
-----------------
We will continue to plan an IAP presentation.
We will obtain replacement test domain servers.
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:
- Get BMC's NetApp server running.
- Deploy delete-machine and change-password web forms.
- Continue transition of WinAthena Tomcat to Service.
- Work through the remaining SMA problems. Paul works on printer
drivers and Netscape.
- Danilo intends to write, someday:
Kerberos work, especially KfW 2.2
WinZephyr final
DHCP & RIS
Build
- Get schema OID from Tom C.
Longer Term Goals
----------------
- Continue to develop web pages allowing container maintenance and
joining student machines to the domain.
- 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
-----
- We continue to get about a request per week to join the domain.
- 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. We hope to make this easier and get help from the Windows
Delivery team and 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.
