[3872] in Release_7.7_team
4 June 2003 Athena UNIX Platform Team Monthly Status Report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Wed Jun 4 13:55:04 2003
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 13:54:17 -0400
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
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Team Name: Athena UNIX Platform Team
Team Leader: Bill Cattey
Report Date: 4 June 2003
Submitted by: Bill Cattey
Team URL: http://web.mit.edu/teamhtml/Athena/
Release URL: http://web.mit.edu/release/www/
Accomplishments past period:
Last Month's goals:
Ongoing: Bug fixing of Athena 9.1 if necessary. -- None was necesary.
Focus shifts to Athena 9.2.
DELAYED: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock
Red
Hat Linux".
DELAYED: Develop fast DNS timeout for disconnected operation.
DELAYED: Develop friendly way to go on/off net or switch interfaces.
DELAYED: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
CHANGED: Investigate workaround for VMWare problem. -- Bill is going to
make sure we can close this issue.
DONE: Deploy Beta release of Athena 9.2.
PROGRESS: Prepare Early release of Athena 9.2
PROGRESS: Evaluate laptop hardware for Athena recommendations.
PROGRESS: Evaluate desktop hardware for Athena recommendations if any
arrives from IBM or HP. -- HP officially withdrew from this year's
desktop buy, but has a Linux laptop they want to show us.
Community Milestone Met:
Athena Beta released on time -- May 15.
Other Accomplishments:
* Made MathML fonts available in Mozilla for Athena 9.2 release at the
request of the Faculty Liaisons.
* Wrote system release notes.
* Fixed bugs in cyrus IMAP perl interface.
* Fixed bugs in sawfish window manager.
* Fixed Linux installer bug that caused problems when populating the
/dev directory.
* Bill prepared a talk for the IBM ThinkTank conference on Athena and
Linux Laptops.
* Investigated hiring contractor to break log jam on delayed
disconnected operation work.
Next month's goals:
Ongoing: Testing and bug fixing of Athena 9.2.
NEW: Prepare user release notes for Athena 9.2
NEW: Deploy Early release of Athena 9.2
NEW: Develop 9.2-based Solaris miniroot.
NEW: Develop RedHat 9-based Linux miniroot.
NEW: Develop Athena 9.2 knfs port.
CHANGED: Investigate quitting worrying about workaround for VMWare
problem.
OLD: Evaluate laptop hardware for Athena recommendations.
OLD: Evaluate desktop hardware for Athena recommendations if any
arrives from IBM or HP.
OLD: Produce document, "Differences between Athena Linux and stock Red
Hat Linux".
OLD: Develop fast DNS timeout for disconnected operation.
OLD: Develop friendly way to go on/off net or switch interfaces.
OLD: Develop Disconnected Athena documentation.
Next Community Milestone(s):
Athena Early release targeted for June 16.
Issues:
GNOME has shifted to prefer the previously unknown metacity window
manager. Shifting the Athena default window manager to metacity
involves some work to craft appropriate configurations, and may involve
some user disruption. We elected to put off this work and disruption.
Key learnings:
Additional comments:
Athena Monthly machine counts:
Summary: About the same as last month.
New method: Have systems get themselves a unique id every time they
install, and report every day they are up. This over-counts systems
installed multiple times, and under-counts systems that predate Athena
9.1.
May April March Delta
756 linux 753 linux 744 linux +3
61 sgi 64 sgi 65 sgi -3
786 sun 824 sun4 799 sun4 -38
Old method: Count unique host names seen rebooting. To remedy
under-count systems that don't reboot, we sum over a six months. That
over-counts systems that were re-purposed to non-athena use.
Summary:
890 Solaris down 19
955 Linux down 45
Eventually the two counts should converge on the same value, but it's
still a noisy count with 10-20% error.
Here are the number of reboots we saw:
Solaris:
Month: Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May
This: 467 746 444 751 495 731
Sum: 1035 1007 958 914 909 890
Linux:
Month: Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May
This: 374 461 410 459 439 326
Sum: 1219 1193 1137 1064 1000 955
