[23576] in Locker Maintainers
AFS sysname changes for upcoming Athena Release
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan D Reed)
Fri Aug 1 10:47:00 2014
From: Jonathan D Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: "locker-maintainers@mit.edu" <locker-maintainers@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2014 14:46:54 +0000
Message-ID: <65C2B1BE-2A2D-4CEF-97BA-8D188686257F@mit.edu>
Reply-To: "release-team@mit.edu" <release-team@MIT.EDU>
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Hello,
The upcoming Athena Release, based on Ubuntu 14.04, will be dropping support for 3 sysnames:
i386_rhel3
i386_ubuntu910
amd64_ubuntu910
Unfortunately, the length of the sysname list is finite, and we had to drop these. i386_rhel3 corresponds with Athena 9.3, released in August 2004. i386_ubuntu910 and amd64_ubuntu910 correspond with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), released in 2009, and EOL’d in September 2011. (This was never deployed to public Athena clusters or the dialup servers).
Please take a moment to check your locker and ensure it has support for more modern sysnames. For many older lockers, it should be sufficient to symlink i386_rhel3 to i386_rhel4 in your arch tree. i386_rhel4 was the last Athena 9.x sysname, and we have no plans to drop it from the compatibility list in the future, provided binary compatibility is still feasible.
The new preferred sysname will be amd64_ubuntu1404 (i386_ubuntu1404 for 32-bit systems), but the compatibility list still includes previously releases.
In an effort to standardize locker layout and provide a more user-friendly experience in the event that a locker does not support any current sysnames, I’d like to ask all locker maintainers to create a file in the top level of your locker called “README.MIT” that contains, at a minimum, a one-sentence summary of the locker, and a contact list for the locker maintainers. If such information is already available in a different file, you may instead symlink that file to README.MIT. Please ensure that README.MIT (and any symlink targets) have "system:anyuser rl” permissions.
Lastly, we would like to begin the process of deprecating the ancient locker paths (/mit/locker/linuxbin, /mit/locker/sun4bin, etc) for Linux. These paths have been superseded by the arch/@sys/bin convention since the 1995 patch release of Athena 7.7, and have never been required any version of Linux Athena. If you are maintaining /mit/locker/linuxbin as a symlink to a target in /mit/locker/arch, consider removing that symlink. If /mit/locker/linuxbin is your primary binary directory, please migrate to /mit/locker/arch, as described in lockers(7).
If you have questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Finally, if you are not also on the release-announce list, I’d encourage you to subscribe at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/release-announce
The list is low traffic, receiving 2-3 e-mails per year at most, but will keep you up to date of when support for Athena releases end, and when new releases are available.
Jonathan Reed
for the Athena Release Team
